Narbolia

The name comes almost certainly from the tree mallow, which in Sardinian is called narbonia and grows in these parts; the people of Narbolia indeed call their village Narabuìa. There circulates, however, a far handsomer version, Nurapolis, the city of the nuraghi, which would suit a territory full of nuraghi very well: except that the source takes it apart with dates. The name Nurapolis was invented at the end of the nineteen-seventies by a group of young students who had founded a cooperative under that name, and from there it passed to the municipal campsite; in the text of Casalis, which is the nineteenth-century source, the form that appears is rather Nurapolia. It is an etymology less than fifty years old. The nuraghi, on the other hand, are real and numerous: the Tradori, the Zoddias, the four-lobed Araganzola, the Cresia, the Terra Craccus, and towards Milis the nuraghe Tunis, famous because Roman coins and terracottas were found inside it.

Being close to the sea, instead, cost dearly. The village suffered many attacks by Barbary corsairs, and the one of 1623 was particularly ferocious: the inhabitants were already in chains when they were freed by men who had come from Seneghe, and it happened near where the cemetery now stands. Two place names between the village and the coast, Trippus and Conca de Moru, are said to recall Tripoli and the moor's head, and to mark the sites of the most important battles. Inland, on the plain of Cadreas, opens the cave they call sa grutta de su sotterru, or the guano cave: it is very warm and in summer holds a colony of thousands of bats hanging from the ceiling. Past the entrance shaft there is a chamber of about ten metres by five and a narrow tunnel of almost rectangular section, which suggests human use in antiquity; further in an elliptical hall with a swallow hole and a second tunnel that nobody has yet explored. On how long the whole thing is, the local accounts do not agree: some say a hundred and twenty metres and some more than a kilometre.