Olmedo

Olmedo has 4,001 inhabitants on a hilly stretch at the foot of Monte Rosso, not far from Alghero. The name is an elm grove said in two languages at once: the Nuragic ulimu, the elm, and the Latin ulmetum, the wood of elms — and elms, before the village grew, there really were. The territory holds more than twenty-five nuraghi, besides the pre-Nuragic village and the megalithic wall of Monte Baranta.

In the Middle Ages Ulumetu was a small village but the chief town of a curatoria, and it appears in the Condaghe di Silki; in the fourteenth century it was fought over by the Doria, the Aragonese and the Giudicato of Arborea, which took it in 1336. The year 1540 was the worst: the Saracens sacked and devastated the village, and with it almost all its records were lost. The lord of the villa, Giacomo Mercer, rebuilt it at his own expense, but the raids went on: by 1603 there were nine hearths left in Olmedo, some forty people. Today the only active bauxite mine in Sardinia is dug here.