Narcao

Narcao has 3,373 inhabitants in the Sulcis, spread between the main village and eight hamlets. Above the village stands Monte Narcao, which instead of a peak has a flat top: they call it Sa Pranedda, the little plain. The origins are around the year one thousand, and it was the Benedictine monks who first got their hands on this countryside, extremely rich in springs — which were for centuries the real resource of the place.

In 1323, when the Aragonese arrived, Narcao already had more than four hundred inhabitants; then the pirate raids, pushing further and further inland, emptied it, and the village was only rebuilt at the end of the eighteenth century, by farmers and shepherds who came down from Barbagia too. It became a comune in 1853, on the same day as Santadi and five other villages of the Sulcis. Near Terraseo stand the walls of a Punic temple dedicated to Demeter and Kore: the ash piled up in the shrine says that people prayed there for a very long time. And since 2012 the white bean of Terraseo, which once brought buyers from all over the Sulcis, has been protected by the regional agricultural agency.