Terralba

Terralba's town hall stands 9 metres above sea level and the highest point of its territory reaches 30: very low earthquake risk, very high flood risk. All this plain was marsh, and taking it back from the water was the undertaking that decided the town's history. The scheme matured between 1895 and 1918, the works were carried out between 1919 and 1928 by the Società Bonifiche Sarde, and the figures give the measure: eighteen thousand hectares involved, millions of cubic metres of earth shifted, thirty-two kilometres of embankments and thirty-three of new roads. The most spectacular piece was the diversion of the Rio Mogoro, which ran for twelve kilometres along the coast turning everything to swamp: they dug it a new bed of eleven kilometres and sent it into the pond of San Giovanni, moving more than a million cubic metres of earth.

The reclamation brought much else with it. In the spring of 1919 the first electric pumps started up, fed by the first high voltage line built specially for the area: that same line also carried current into the houses. From 1924 the farming centres opened one after another, and from 1927 families of farmers arrived from the Polesine, summoned by Mussolini: a first group of about one hundred and fifty people took over the holdings prepared by Sardinian workers, and others followed until they passed one thousand five hundred. But the greatest change was medical: with the marshes went malaria, which on this plain had been a nightmare for two thousand years.