The name Golfo Aranci does not mean what it seems to mean, and the sources do not agree on what it does mean: some take it from Cala 'e sos aranzos, from the Sardinian word for the balls of posidonia fibre that wash up on the shore; others call it a recent Italianisation of the Gallurese Golfu di li Ranci, the gulf of the crabs; others still derive it from Gallurese words that do not exist. Before that it was simply Figari, the name the town still carries in Sardinian, Gallurese and Corsican, and the one found again in the headland of Capo Figari and the island of Figarolo.
Everything here arrived from somewhere else, and not long ago. The first inhabitants were shepherds who in the nineteenth century stretched their pastures out along this tongue of land; then the fish-rich sea drew fishermen from Ponza, Ventotene and Pozzuoli, so much so that the patron is Saint Silverius, the saint of Ponza, and on the twentieth of June the mass and the procession are held out in the gulf aboard the fishing boats. The port and the railway — the Cagliari-Golfo Aranci line ends here, and this is the only Sardinian facility able to take train ferries — brought families from all over Italy, and the local speech still carries the cadences of the regions they came from. The comune has been independent of Olbia only since 1979.
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📅 Every year, on 19 March
Golfo Aranci celebrates Saint Joseph on 19 March. On 20 June, the feast of Saint Silverius, patron of Ponza, the people of Golfo Aranci recall the exodus of the Ponza fishermen who founded the town.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Golfo Aranci, but an easy day trip away.
