Alghero

The name comes from seaweed: Aleguerium, for the posidonia the sea piles up on the beach. And it is almost the only modest thing about Alghero. The Doria did not found it in the twelfth century, as is repeated: the excavations of Marco Milanese have moved the town's birth forward by a century and a half, to the middle of the thirteenth. The turning point is 1354, and it was brutal: Peter IV of Aragon took the town, deported the Sardinian-Ligurian population to the Iberian peninsula and the Balearics as slaves, and repopulated it with Catalan colonists drawn by the Crown's privileges. From that comes the Catalan still spoken here.

More than one inhabitant in five speaks it, it is a minority language recognised by the State, and the Generalitat de Catalunya keeps a delegation in Alghero: the Sardinian Barceloneta is not a figure of speech. Inside the sixteenth-century seaward bastions, the centre is a weave of golden lanes, and the walk on the walls at sunset, towards Capo Caccia, is the daily rite of the Coral Riviera — the red coral, fished for ever in this bay, is in the town's arms too. The cliff of Capo Caccia has the shape of a sleeping giant; beneath it are the Grotte di Nettuno, reached by boat or down the 656 steps of the Escala del Cabirol. To the north, the beaches of Maria Pia and Le Bombarde.