At kilometer 145 of the state road 131 (junction for Macomer-Birori towards Sassari), the nuraghe Santa Barbara can be seen towering on a basalt plateau on the slopes of the mountain.Manai, in a dominant position over the plain of Abbasanta. Leaving the main Sardinian road, you will take an uphill path and after a few steps, you will admire in all its majesty this nuraghe, named after the ruins of the countryside church dedicated to the saint. It is a complex type of architecture, consisting of a central tower and a quadrilobate bastion, almost nine meters high, which encloses an open courtyard. The four towers of the bastion, dating back to the 15th century BC, are connected by curtain walls built with basalt blocks. Originally, it was defended by an antemural, attested in the 19th century and currently barely ‘legible’.
You will enter through a quadrangular entrance that leads to the courtyard. Here, the accesses to the towers open up. The central one is 15 meters high and has a diameter of nine meters. Built with carefully worked blocks arranged in regular horizontal rows, it includes intact a room on the ground floor, with three niches arranged in a cross, and a circular room on the first floor, illuminated by a large window with a lintel. The profile of a third room can be discerned at the top. The lateral towers used to communicate with each other through corridors inside the outer walls. Towers B and C are well preserved. The first, accessible from a short corridor, has a circular plan of over three meters in diameter. A trapezoidal entrance opens in one wall and leads to a small landing with three large niches-slit openings. Tower C, also circular and larger (four meters in diameter and five high), is directly accessible from the courtyard through a lintel entrance, and shows two niches-slit openings and three small cupboards. Towers D and E are almost completely destroyed. Around the nuraghe, the remains of a large settlement are preserved, which had a long life, from the mid-2nd millennium BC until the Roman era, and then into the early medieval period. (from Sardegna Turismo)
The photos of the nuraghe Santa Barbara di Macomer are by: Maurizio Cossu, Alberto Valdès, Marco Secchi, and Lucia Corda
