This land has been emptied and filled again more than once. In the Middle Ages there were seven or eight villages here, and they all disappeared; the last of them, Villanova Castiadas, was abandoned in the fifteen hundreds because of plague and malaria. Towards the middle of the seventeen hundreds a man, Giovanni Maria Mameli, asked and obtained from the Savoy government the grant of those depopulated lands, to bring livestock and crops into them, and in 1752 he began to build a settlement; when he died, the district went back to the count of Quirra and the territory emptied again.
In the middle of the eighteen hundreds the marshes were drained, but not for farmers: in 1875 the largest penal colony in Italy was opened here, as part of a plan to repopulate the areas malaria had emptied and to turn the marsh into fields. It worked until the nineteen fifties, and today it is a museum. Around the colony the colonists made the hamlets; after the war the land reform agency brought two more into being, and among the people who went to live in them were the Italian Tunisians who had left North Africa for good. Castiadas became a comune only in 1986, by putting together frazioni that belonged to three other comuni — Villaputzu, San Vito and Muravera. It has no proper main village: the houses lie scattered, and the coast below has some of the finest beaches on this side of the island.
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📅 Every year, on the last weekend of June
On the last weekend of June Castiadas, a municipality of 1,507 inhabitants in Sud Sardegna (South Sardinia), celebrates its patron Saint John the Baptist.
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 Castiadas, but an easy day trip away.
