Sartiglia horseback jousting, pink flamingo lagoons, and Phoenician ruins on Sardinia's west coast
Oristano is Sardinia's most distinctly Sard provincial capital — not Italianized, not touristic, but deeply local: a city whose great annual event (the Sartiglia festival) has been performed in medieval costumes on horseback since 1543, whose nearby lagoons host 10,000 pink flamingos in winter, and whose coastline conceals Tharros — one of the best-preserved Phoenician and Roman sites in the western Mediterranean, standing on a windswept promontory above the sea. The Sinis Peninsula stretching south from Oristano has some of Sardinia's finest beaches, and the inland wetlands of the Oristano l…
The Oristano area has been continuously inhabited since the Nuragic Bronze Age (1800–238 BC): the Sinis Peninsula's nuraghi (stone tower-fortresses) and the Phoenician city of Tharros (founded c. 730 BC) demonstrate the region's strategic importance as the nearest point of the Sardinian coast to mainland Carthage. Oristano itself was founded in the 11th century when Tharros was abandoned due to Saracen raids and malarial lagoon conditions; it became the capital of the Giudicato of Arborèa — the last independent Sardinian kingdom, which resisted Aragonese conquest for 70 years longer than the…