…for real?
What a name…!
And……the day started with a big Bugger You to Mr Google Maps as he took us down two long dead ends! To be fair…In Italy, Google’s cycle routes usually work well but today, they did not. So it was a long and tiresome exit from Cagliari….having to backtrack and take too-big roads for too long to escape the clutches of the city.
It was a fairly tedious….largely flat…ride to the South West coast. Four years ago I had cycled up the East coast of Sardinia…so this time, it had to be the West!
Our target was SP73…a road which winds up the coast. And it was a great relief to turn onto this largely deserted road…
….past some great beaches…and up high into the hills….
….before our destination came into view. Buggerru! Ready for a great swoosh down into this strange little town.
It used to be a big mining town…a French company extracted oner 100,000 tonnes of zinc from here! The Romans found silver here. And others have taken lead etc.
But the last mine closed in the 1970’s, followed by a precipitous population decline. More recently it has been re-inventing itself as a tourist town, but despite the label…one cannot help but think it has not quite yet made it! Strangely empty….and surely the season has started by now……but maybe it has not…it isn’t ‘mid-July for four more days!! (It really is quite incredible actually…how many places depend entirely on the summer’s high season which lasts no more than six weeks!! I just do not understand how it works, given the capital investment required…is the same for six weeks…or for forty six weeks…with all the associated problems of temporary staffing etc etc)
A hotel stay here….a fairly shabby place, but not sure the newer swisher one near the ‘marina’ has yet even opened for the ‘season’…..and as soon as we had checked in, I was off to the beach. A largely deserted man-made beach…but the water quality was superb. Good swimming.
Icy-cold Ichnusas afterwards in the local bar…whose opening hours are advertised as 5.30am to 1am!! Amazing! I did not test the limits…but I did retire from the restaurant next door after midnight (still open)..& checked in for coffee at 6.15am!
And at midnight the nearby square was full of lively young kids having a fine time!! Bugger me!! A different life in Buggerru (indeed in most of Southern Europe!)….where kids’ bedtimes are just not a thing.
