Silius

Under Silius lies one of the largest fluorite deposits in Sardinia, and among the largest in Europe. The industrial working of the Muscadroxiu-Gennas Tres Montis complex began in the nineteen fifties and peaked between the seventies and the eighties, when the mine employed almost six hundred people and brought out more than four hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of raw ore a year: in a village that today has little more than a thousand inhabitants, that meant half the village and half the district worked underground. Then demand for fluorite shrank, the crisis began in the late eighties, in 2006 the operating company went into liquidation and extraction stopped; the remaining staff were put to keeping the plant safe. The ore, however, is still there: some three million tonnes of fluorite are reckoned to remain, and new plants are being built.

Even before the mine, the importance of this place lay in what surrounded it. North of the village, on a hill at about 430 metres, are the remains of the castle of Sassai, which here they call Orguglioso, the proud one: built probably in 1253 in the Pisan period to control the Gerrei, it was besieged and destroyed in 1353 in the war between Aragon and the judicate of Arborea, and there survive the walls, a quadrangular tower, a round tower set in the circuit, the cistern and the oven. Further off, at Nuraxi — named after a village that had already vanished by the sixteenth century — four nuraghi draw a quadrilateral with the settlement at its centre; the Romans reoccupied them to watch the border between the Gallilenses and the Patulcenses, that is, in their own words, between the mountain people and the more civilised people of the plain.