Patron saint festival In 214 days
Saint Nicholas and the Casa Barca Museum
📅 Every year, on the third Sunday of May
Ottana celebrates Saint Nicholas on the third Sunday of May.
At the centre of Ottana stands a cathedral with no diocese: the Romanesque San Nicola, built between 1140 and 1160 and consecrated as the work ended, which holds the polyptych commissioned by Mariano IV of Arborea in 1344. The town's coat of arms is an exact inventory of the place: the church, a nuraghe and a bishop's mitre. At carnival out come the Boes, with their ox-featured masks and sheepskins, and the Merdules, with monstrous long-nosed wooden faces.
Ottana was the chief town of the curatoria of Marghine, in the Judicate of Torres, and then a bishop's seat suffragan to Torres, until in 1503 the diocese was suppressed and merged into that of Alghero; malaria emptied the town over the course of the sixteenth century, and the cathedral stayed where it was. The same thing happened again in the nineteen-seventies, when the plain was chosen for a textile and petrochemical complex funded by the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno: the results were not the ones expected, and today farming, herding and crafts are coming back. In 2013 forty-five hectares of that industrial area became the largest photovoltaic park in Sardinia.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Ottana 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Ottana
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Ottana, but an easy day trip away.
chiesa dei Santi Gervasio e Protasio 📍 Belluno · 12 km A thirteenth-century church in Belluno divided in two by a wall, between the faithful and the enclosed nuns. basilica cattedrale di San Martino 📍 Belluno · 14 km Belluno's cathedral, rebuilt by Tullio Lombardo in the sixteenth century, with Juvarra's bell tower. chiesa di San Rocco 📍 Belluno · 14 km Belluno's votive church, born of the plague of 1530, in Castellavazzo stone, with a canvas by Gaspare Diziani. chiesa di Santo Stefano 📍 Belluno · 14 km The Servites' Gothic church in Belluno, in white and red stone, with Brustolon's angels and a 24-hour clock. chiesa di Sant'Aronne 📍 Belluno · 16 km The parish church of Cusighe, in Belluno, with an altarpiece by Girolamo Denti and a Last Supper by Paris Bordon. chiesa di San Liberale 📍 Belluno · 16 km A very old little church on the hill of Pedeserva, in Belluno, with a stone-slab roof and a crypt.