Perfugas

The name says fugitives: it continues the Latin perfugas, «immigrants, runaways», and refers to the legend about the origin of the Balari, the proto-Sardinian people who lived in these lands. The frontier, hereabouts, can still be heard: in the main village they speak northern Logudorese, while in the hamlets of the Sassu two varieties of Gallurese are spoken. The ground is thick with the past — some sixty nuraghi and about fifteen domus de janas — and inside the old centre there is a nuragic complex with a finely built sacred well, that of Predio Canopoli.

In the church of Santa Vittoria di Su Sassu, of 1120, the parchment of consecration was found: it is the oldest document in Caroline script in all Sardinia. In the parish church, instead, is kept the retablo of San Giorgio, one of the largest on the island, more than eight metres high. And the village museum holds, besides some of the oldest stone artefacts so far found in Sardinia and the plant fossils of the petrified forests of the Anglona, a small Mother Goddess with child of the fourth millennium before Christ.