Mogoro

Mogoro has 4,354 inhabitants and lies on the southern buttresses of Monte Arci, on the Sa Struvina plateau: from the nearby volcano came the obsidian that in pre-Nuragic times made the village a centre of working and exchange. The territory holds twenty-seven nuraghi, but only the Cuccurada, visible from the Carlo Felice trunk road, has been excavated and can be visited today. In the nineteen-thirties the Rio Mogoro was barred by a dam that forms no lake at all: it serves only to keep the floods away from the plain of Uras and Pabillonis.

In the Middle Ages Mogoro belonged to the giudicato of Arborea and to the curatoria of Parte Montis, of which it became the chief town; not far off stood Bonorcili, swept away by Barbary raiders before the fourteenth century. It passed to the Aragonese as a fief of the Carroz counts of Quirra and in 1603 to the marquisate of Quirra, until the redemption of 1839. The parish church of San Bernardino keeps the relics of the eucharistic miracle of 1604, while in summer the fair of Sardinian artistic craft gathers over a hundred exhibitors around the carpets and tapestries of Mogoro.