Gallura Experience
in Trenino Verde (Green Train) from Palau to Tempio Pausania
Along the Palau - Tempio Pausania route,
at 09:00 the old locomotive whistles and puffs. The Little Green Train leaves with its convoy of train carriages from the Officine Breda. Riveted green metals outside, fine wood in the interior. Your Tourist Guide will be waiting for you at the Palau Station, to tell you about these means of transport and this line that from the nineteenth century connected the former newborn commercial port of Palau, through Gallura, up to Tempio Pausania, then to Sassari and finally to the port of Alghero. We will travel from the east to the west. The sea is behind you and between a daring railway bridge and a few tunnels, you can see the granite mamelons, pink coloured before and gray after. From the windows you can see “cussorgie” and “stazzi” (hamlets and farmhouses), the leitmotif of the agro-pastoral history of these places, which have forever indissolubly united Corsicans and Sardinians.
Once at the Arzachena station, a first "gem" of your day. The 15 mins stop will give you time to try to creatively manipulate the clay, in the ceramic laboratory for you. After crossing the “Coddu Vecchiu - La Prisgiona" archaeological area, we will find the stations of Caldosa, Capichera and Oddastru, before reaching Sant’Antonio di Gallura station. After we get off the train, we will be in a few hundred meters at the viewpoint on the Liscia Lake to take must-have photos, before reaching our bus that brings us to Sant’Antonio di Gallura in ten minutes. Here the “stazzi” (farmhouses) became cussorgia (hamlets) and in 1979 became an independent municipality from Calangianus. With a short stop we will see the medieval church of Sant'Andrea and the one of S.Antonio Abate (1917), then "Palazzu Mannu" which draws our attention to the civil buildings, the typical Gallura architecture chermes, on display along "sa carrarera longa” (“the long street”). It could also be an opportunity for a short stop at the bar. Shortly after, we will cross the cork plantations that has always supplied this man-made activity, reaching Luras for a visit to the pre-Nuragic archaeological area (5,000 years old) characterized by the Dolmen Ladas and Ciuledda.
A few steps and we will be back by bus heading to Calangianus, where the visit to the Artisan Workshop of cork will increase our knowledge with peculiar questions and answers, while the "cortex" becomes a “dress". At 13:00 we will travel for a few kilometers, up to the point where we will taste the “zuppa gallurese”, meats and cheeses, fresh vegetables, comfortably seated in a characteristic farmhouse. By bus again for the short and comfortable journey up to Tempio Pausania, the "City of Stone", as Vittorio Emanuele I awarded it already in 1833. A short itinerary among tight streets, squares and churches. We cannot avoid to talk about Fabrizio De André (a famous Italian songwriter), about his kidnapping and about that dramatic period of banditry. At the lovely railway station, we will admire the "Liberty Style" paintings by Giuseppe Biasi (1931) before entering the adjacent Railway Repair-shops of the Palau-Sassari-Alghero lines.
At 16:00 the journey by the Little green train starts again, travelling along the line we left early in the morning and allowing us to visit what is impossible to find along the line. We are in the direction of Nuchis, then Luras-Calangianus, but it will be impossible not to mention the legendary “Muto di Gallura” (the Mute of Gallura). Bastiano Tansu who lived in hiding during the blood feud between Vasa and Mamia families, before being unveiled to the world by Costa in 1884 and brought back to a third public life by the success of the film of the same title (2022).
We will reach Lake Liscia through amazing landscapes over the bridge, at Sant’Antonio di Gallura station and then to Arzachena (18:20). The sea will be really close, you can hear it, but you won't see it yet. We need to continue for a few kilometers northward, then, after a big curve, it lies before us, with the extraordinary view of the La Maddalena Archipelago. At 19.15 the adventure ends at Palau station, happy and full of experiences to share.
LOOK AT THE POSTER