For seven centuries Iglesias dug, and the town was founded by a man everyone knows for the way he died: count Ugolino della Gherardesca, who in the thirteenth century gathered the scattered settlements of the Cixerri to work the silver and called them Villa di Chiesa. Ugolino ended walled up in the tower at Pisa, but his town worked very well indeed: at the beginning of the fourteenth century these mines produced about ten per cent of the silver circulating in Europe, and a preacher, Giordano da Pisa, said so from the pulpit in 1309, where is silver dug? At Villa di Chiesa. Ugolino's sons, taking refuge here, even opened a mint and struck coins bearing their own names; and the town archive still keeps the Breve di Villa di Chiesa, the town's code of laws, in a copy from 1327.
The mines kept going until yesterday, and today they can be visited: Porto Flavia, the loading quay cut inside the cliff sheer above the sea so that ore could be poured into the ships, is among the most spectacular sites of industrial archaeology in Europe, and Monteponi is a landscape of its own. The centre keeps its Pisan walls, a fourteenth-century cathedral and a Holy Week of hooded processions with a Spanish flavour, inherited from the Aragonese centuries when Iglesias was one of the royal towns of Sardinia. All around, the Iglesiente alternates wild coves with ghost mining villages: a deep Sardinia, far from the beach circuit.
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📅 Every year, on 11 August; on 15 August the Festa di Sancta Maria di Mezo di Gosto with the candelieri is held
Iglesias celebrates Saint Clare on 11 August; a few days later, on 15 August, the Festa di Sancta Maria di Mezo di Gosto is held, a religious procession with shoulder-borne votive structures called «candelieri», in honour of the Assumed Virgin.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Iglesias, but an easy day trip away.
