Sardinia’s mysterious beehive towers

Expecting not to find much more than a pile of big stones, I followed the sign off the motorway into a little car park and there it was, rising from a flat, green landscape covered in little white flowers, with a few donkeys dotted around: Nuraghe Losa. From a distance, it looked like a big sandcastle with its top crumbling away, but as I walked towards it, I began to realise the colossal size of the monument in front of me.

Nuraghi (the plural of nuraghe) are massive conical stone towers that pepper the landscape of the Italian island of Sardinia. Built between 1600 and 1200BCE, these mysterious Bronze Age bastions were constructed by carefully placing huge, roughly worked stones, weighing several tons each, on top of each other in a truncated formation.

Today, more than 7,000 nuraghi are still visible across the Mediterranean's second-largest island. From the flat basin of Sardinia's southern Campidano plain to the rugged hilltops and granite boulder-strewn valleys of its northern Gallura region, these megalithic monuments stand guard over ancient trade routes, river crossings and sacred sites. The instantly recognisable beehive-shaped buildings are not found anywhere else in the world, and so have come to symbolise Sardinia.

However, it's still not clear how or why Bronze Age Sardinians of this Nuragic civilisation constructed these imposing towers. Theories about their use range from fortifications and dwellings to food stores, places of worship or even astronomical observatories. The likelihood is that they served several of these purposes during the course of their history, as the towers remained central to Nuragic life for centuries.

In 1953, Sardinia's most famous archaeologist, Giovanni Lilliu, wrote in Italy's Le vie d'Italia magazine, "The nuraghi, for Sardinia are a bit like the pyramids for Egypt and the Colosseum for Rome: testimonies not only of a flourishing and historically active civilisation but also of a spiritual concept that gave its external manifestations a monumental and lasting character."

Lilliu is best known for his excavation of the island's most elaborate Nuragic settlement: the Unesco-inscribed Su Nuraxi, consisting of a fortified central nuraghe surrounded by a honeycomb structure of round, interlocking stone huts spilling down the hillside. In addition to Su Nuraxi, two of Sardinia's most important nuraghi are Nuraghe Arrubiu – a monumental five-lobed bastion whose 30m central tower was one of the tallest structures in Bronze Age Europe – and Losa, which consists of a central keep surrounded by three smaller towers encased by a curtain wall. Today, the structure stands 13m tall, but in its heyday, experts estimate the complex would have been nearly twice that.

Entering Losa through a narrow gap in the lichen-covered stone wall, I found dark passageways, framed by huge, rounded rocks, leading in different directions; and above me, a 3,300-year-old ceiling that resembled an inverted pine cone. To my great surprise and amazement, a spiral staircase hidden in the inner walls led up to the roof of the building. Although worn down to more of a rocky slope in some places, the staircase is still so perfectly functional that I walked up and down several times, imagining all the people who would have trodden those steps before me.

BBC