Southwest Sardinia is home to one of Europe’s most important mining heritage sites. For over a century, lead, zinc, silver and coal were extracted from dozens of sites. Today, many of these places have become true open-air museums, suspended between nature and industrial memory.

At Porto Flavia, near Masua, a masterpiece of 1924 engineering made it possible to load ore directly onto ships through tunnels carved into the cliff. Not far away, Nebida and Buggerru preserve washing plants, shafts, and mining structures tied to a history also marked by dramatic events, such as the 1904 miners’ massacre.

Further inland, Montevecchio and Ingurtosu reveal the scale of the great mining communities through management buildings, churches, schools, and workers’ housing. In Carbonia, the Grande Miniera di Serbariu—now the Italian Center for Coal Culture—lets visitors enter the tunnels and get a firsthand sense of the miners’ lives.

A heritage of shafts, tunnels, and mining villages that the Cammino Minerario di Santa Barbara connects, step by step, restoring the memory of a vanished world still deeply present in the landscape.