Guamaggiore put itself where it is now after a plague. The epidemics between 1651 and 1655 and then that of 1681 emptied the old settlement, and the survivors moved a little further north, where the village stands today. At the centre of that removal there is a church: the parish church of San Sebastiano, raised by the survivors of a pestilence in honour of the martyr who was invoked to make the contagion cease — the source calls it of the seventeenth century, although the first records are of 1561 — and the village grew up around it. The arrows to be seen on the town's arms are that saint's attributes. Inside, the church has polychrome marbles in the presbytery and in the side chapels, and in the choir an organ built in 1772 by the Lombard Giuseppe Lazzari.
The older stones, though, tell yet another story. The church of Santa Maria Maddalena, with its porch in front and its bell-gable, was begun in 1219 using the materials of a nuraghe of which no trace has remained: one monument ate the other. At the entrance of the village, at the top of a flight of steps, stands instead San Pietro, gothic, of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, with a single nave and three niches in the presbytery. And on the boundary with Guasila is the nuragic palace of Barru, a three-lobed nuraghe with an inner well, among the most interesting monuments of the Trexenta, dug from 2010 onwards. The comune, for twenty years, did not even exist: from 1928 to 1946 it was joined, together with Ortacesus, to Selegas.
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📅 Every year, on 20 January
On 20 January Guamaggiore celebrates its patron Saint Sebastian the Martyr, to whom the parish church is dedicated; the territory preserves the Nuraghe Barru.
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.
