The name comes from the Catalan Puerto Escús, where escus is the old past participle of escondir, to hide: Portoscuso is the hidden port. The town was born of tuna. In the second half of the sixteenth century, with the building of the tuna traps, the huts in which the fishermen lived during the season began to turn into a permanent settlement; at the end of the century the coastal tower was built, today called the Spanish Tower, put under an alcalde but garrisoned by only two soldiers, which made it more a lookout than anything else. In the seventeenth century there worked here tuna men, coral fishers and merchants from Sardinia, Sicily, Liguria, Marseilles and Majorca: the first rais came from Trapani, and in all likelihood it was they who brought the cult of the Madonna d'Itria.
The Barbary pirates attacked the town again and again. In one of those raids the tower was half destroyed, and the inhabitants who had taken shelter where the sports field is today were killed on the spot or carried off as slaves: that place is still called Monte Dolorosu, the mount of sorrow, and a cross and a plaque stand there to remember it. In 1738, instead, the tuna works of Su Pranu took in the Ligurian families who had just fled Tabarka, while their new town of Carloforte was being finished on the island of San Pietro. Portoscuso became a municipality in its own right in 1853.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Portoscuso
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
