Orroli

The name of Orroli, Arrolli in Sardinian, means downy oak, but what you actually see in the Sarcidano is stone and water: the Arrubiu, the largest and most complex nuraghe in Sardinia and the only intact example with five towers, and the two dams on the Flumendosa and the Mulargia, which formed as many lakes. The church of San Nicola, by contrast, is a piece of stratigraphy: beneath its floor excavations found an early medieval building raised on Nuragic walls and, deeper still, the outline of a Christian temple from the sixth century.

In the Middle Ages the village belonged to the Judicate of Cagliari and to the curatoria of Siurgus; when the Aragonese summoned the first Sardinian parliament in Cagliari, in 1355, Orroli sent its representatives, and from then on it began to decline. In 1604 it was absorbed into the duchy of Mandas, and it bought itself out of feudal rule only in 1839. A second village, Mulargia, once stood in this territory, a fief of the Pimentel and then of the Tellez-Giron; today that name belongs to the lake. To the church of San Vincenzo Ferreri, built in 1704, its founder left the right of burial, reserved for his own family alone.