Giba

The name comes from the Campidanese Sardinian gibba, meaning hill. Through this territory ran the road the Phoenicians took from Karalis towards Sulki and which the Romans later paved, and when the harbour of Sant'Antioco was closed a landing place was used at Porto Botte, called Porto Sulcitanum. There, in 1323, the Aragonese fleet led by the infante Alfonso came ashore: from that beach began the campaign that defeated the Pisans and opened four centuries of Iberian rule over the island. The census the Aragonese made that same year gives Giba sixty hearths, that is about three hundred inhabitants; in 1355 the village sent its representatives to the parliament held at Cagliari, and by 1446 it was recorded as uninhabited.

The hamlet of Villarios, instead, has two histories. The old village, which grew beside a nuragic settlement, kept the church of Santa Marta, attested in 1066, and a sixteenth-century watchtower built unusually far from the coast in order to watch the landing places of the gulf of Palmas. At the end of the nineteen fifties the reservoir of Monte Pranu was filled, and water seeping from it ruined the houses of Villarios, of Palmas and of Tratalias: the inhabitants were moved into new villages built for the purpose, and old Villarios was demolished. Of it there remain the church and the ruined tower.