Santa Maria Coghinas

The village stands on the western bank of the river Coghinas, at the foot of the hills that close a very fertile alluvial valley, at an average height of two metres above sea level. Its origins go back to the beginning of the second millennium, in the giudicato of Torres, within the curatoria of Anglona, and the oldest things in its territory are the castle of Casteldoria and the Romanesque church of the Madonna delle Grazie. As a comune, though, it is very young, and it has changed hands twice: it used to be part of Sedini; in 1960 it entered the scattered comune of Valledoria, which had just been created; and only in 1983 did it become a comune of its own.

Geographically Santa Maria Coghinas is in the Anglona, but the language spoken here is Gallurese, and Gallurese too are the uses and customs: the village stands on one side of a border and speaks from the other. Its land is worked intensively, thanks to the alluvial plains. And in the bed of the Coghinas hot springs come up at more than eighty degrees; a spa with a hotel has been built on the spot. The coat of arms, granted in 2019 in place of the one the comune had used since 2003, puts four dominations on the same shield: a tower for the giudicato of Torres, the black eagle of the Doria, the tree of the giudicato of Arborea and the red and gold spindles of the Centelles, a Catalan family that held fiefs in Spain, in Sardinia, in Sicily and in the kingdom of Naples.