Arbus

Nobody has ever managed to settle the question of the name. In 1895 Giuseppe Vaquer, born in Villasor and transplanted here, wrote a book about his adopted town and linked Arbus to the adjective white: he thought of the pale granite massifs, or of snow-covered peaks, but he was honest and called his own ideas conjectures, because little snow falls here. In 2013 the linguist Massimo Pittau confirmed the link with the Campidanese arbus, whites, from the Latin albus, without being able to explain what the colour had to do with it: his best guess is that it refers to is Arbus, the family who owned the farmstead around which the village grew.

The territory is the third largest in Sardinia, after Sassari and Olbia, and it holds two worlds together. Inland there are Ingurtosu and Montevecchio, the villages that grew up around the lead and zinc mines which kept this area alive for a century and a half and which today form part of the geomining park. On the coast, which runs for some forty kilometres, are the dunes of Piscinas and Scivu: they reach about a hundred metres and are the highest in Europe. From here come also the black sheep of Arbus and the arburesa, one of the models of the typical Sardinian folding knife.