Ortacesus

Ortacesus lies in the Trexenta, which is one of the wheat lands of Sardinia, and the village has done the most sensible thing: in the former Casa Serra it has put the Museum of Wheat, where the work that kept this countryside standing is told. The rest is found outside the built-up area: the nuraghe that here they call S'Omu de S'Orcu, that is, the house of the ogre — a name often given in Sardinia to ancient buildings too big for people to attribute them to ordinary men. In the village are the parish church of San Pietro and the church of Santa Lucia; outside, in the fields, that of San Bartolomeo. The language spoken is western Campidanese.

The history is that of a land which changed hands every time the master of the island changed. In the middle ages Ortacesus belonged to the Giudicato of Cagliari, in the curatoria of Trexenta; when the giudicato fell, in 1258, it passed briefly to Arborea, and in 1295 the giudice Mariano II left by will the territories of the former giudicato of Cagliari to the republic of Pisa. In 1324 the Aragonese arrived and took the whole Trexenta; in 1434 the village was granted in fief to Giacomo de Besora, and in 1497 it ended up in the county of Villasor, of the Alagón, where it stayed until the redemption of 1839. In the twentieth century, then, the village stopped existing as a comune for a while: from 1928 to 1946 Ortacesus was aggregated, together with Guamaggiore, to the comune of Selegas.