Sardinia: 10 reasons to visit Alghero

The most common thing to say about a seaside town is that its claim to fame is its SEA. If all seas were the same, you would be right. But Alghero's sea is different from all the waters that you’ve ever seen, crossed, embraced, dived into. The sea of Alghero sings to the strings of mandolins and Catalan, Arab and Indian guitars; its city BEACH is incredibly long and white; it has the sweetest shorelines that know how to tell a story; of unexpected love and fleeting encounters; it is a port where you wait for fishermen to come home with their day’s catch; the sea of Alghero gifts you with lobsters the color of summer. 

Alghero’s sky is beauty, a blue stolen from infinity, it is life, and love. The people of Alghero have a different horizon, which is almost too grand to take in.

CAPO CACCIA is the sleeping child on the sea that is in reality the most beautiful frame for a sunset. Every Alghero native carries this image in their wallet of memories and every tourist has immortalized it with a photograph that will last a lifetime. The sun knows and in summer it crouches on that hill, between the head and the belly, in a golden dusk awaiting the appearance of the stars.

Inside that body of rock are stalactites and stalagmites that speak of eternity. Everyone should take the beautiful Stairs of Cabirol to reach NEPTUNE’S CAVES, everyone should walk that stretch of magic and happiness,prancing down its steps likea carefree, happy deer. The caves will take you to an enchanting world of fairy tales, shadows and rainbows, salt lakes and a silence that is life. And love.

Then, as if in a spell, you can retrace your steps and immerse yourself in Alghero’s HISTORIC CENTER, one of the most beautiful and preserved of Sardinia. You will feel as if you were walking back in the Renaissance, at the beginning of your own story. 

Stores selling CORAL creations, in passionate red, the symbol of a city that divides its beauty between yellow and red, between strolls on the bastion wall that hugs the old town, and everywhere a strong affection for words, sometimes incomprehensible, that define the perimeter of a unique city: “Algherese” , an old CATALAN language similar to that spoken in today’s Catalonia, the strength of untranslatable words, the "llua" that is a mixture of longing and contemplation.

Alghero’s people have that deceptively casual and contemplative smile that comes from observing the sea as part of daily life, certain that it will be there always and forever.

Getting to this city is simple: choose the AIRPORT, just ten minutes outside of town. From here you will reach a land of exchange, a mixture of cultures and opportunities. You come to Alghero, full of curiosity, in order to understand this unique town in the middle of the Mediterranean. You leave with the awareness that you’ve been to a very special place.

Seemingly pagan, colorful and vocal, yet capable of immense and uninterrupted silences. Take the HOLY WEEK rituals, when red becomes purple. The long, winding procession snaking through the old town, a meeting of believers and passions, tears that fall on the little round stones from the sea used to pave the cobbled streets. Alghero is this beautiful and incredible union between a thousand flavors, a thousand colors, a thousand scents. Alghero is Sardinia, it’s Mediterranean, it's poetry and prose, it's fishermen's nets, songs of love and escape, it's beaches and cliffs, it's Catalan cuisine, it's sea urchins, lobsters, the cloister of San Francesco with its ancient Latin music, it's the passage between the Middle Ages and the future. No one who passes through Sardinia can forget this city that knows how to welcome, knows how to be open to new things, knows how to be lazy and sleepy and strong and serene and lively and proud. Alghero is Sardinia, Italy, Europe, but it is also Africa, Asia, Oceania. It is language and love. 

And one of the ten reasons to visit this little fairy tale of a town is CENTRO MEDITERRANEO PINTADERA, a small Italian language school in the heart of the historic centre, which has the true characteristics to connect, understand, intertwine, embrace the emotions of visitors who decide to make their dream come true, and learn the Italian language through the magnificence of this ancient city that knows how to reveal itself day by day.

The people of Alghero have beaches and rocky shores, so they have a different perspective on life and ways of being. They are women and men who have refined their existence with a certain indifference: they share their pastel colours to embellish the lives of those who arrive in this part of the world. The tourist, in Alghero, will find just the right amount of love, attention, music and language.

But above all, they will find a tranquillity that no longer exists elsewhere, they will be able to touch all the points of an immense pentagram that in Alghero they call with a single word: "llibertat". The freedom to be, to unite, to merge with beauty and infinity. Alghero is the sky that everyone would like to see from their window, the skyline that every architect wanted to design. Alghero welcomes poets, writers, readers, lovers, the religious, the curious; if you’re old fashioned, distant, imperfect and an unloved unbeliever, come here for a while. You will discover that Alghero adapts itself to everyone because it is the sea that shapes, the sun that crystallizes, the mistral wind that softens edges and makes life smoother. Alghero is the desire to be here, hope, the force of words, and the art of silences, mystery, passion. And it is tourism. The real kind, the stuff memories of a lifetime are made from. Alghero belongs to everyone and is for everyone. Alghero is forever.