Necropolis of Anghelu Ruju

The Necropolis of Anghelu Ruju lies in the countryside north of Alghero, close to the Riviera del Corallo airport, and is the largest pre-Nuragic rock-cut cemetery in Sardinia. Its 38 underground chamber tombs, known in Sardinian as domus de janas ('houses of the fairies'), were carved into the soft local sandstone between roughly 3300 and 1800 BC, spanning the late Neolithic Ozieri culture through the Copper Age and into the early Bronze Age — more than a millennium of use before the great nuraghi were raised. Discovered in 1903 during quarrying for a nearby winery and excavated in the following decades, the necropolis documents the funerary world of some of the island's earliest settled communities. The tombs were collective burials, reached through entrance pits or short corridors leading into one or more rock-cut chambers; many imitate the houses of the living, with carved doorways, pillars, false beams and ceilings reproducing domestic timber roofing. Several are decorated with symbolic reliefs, most strikingly the protomes of bull's horns associated with a Copper Age fertility and afterlife cult, which make Anghelu Ruju a key reference for prehistoric Sardinian religious iconography. Grave goods recovered here — pottery, stone and metal tools, ornaments and early copper objects — are displayed in the archaeological museums of Sassari and Cagliari. The site is presented as an open-air walk among the tombs, several of which can be entered, and is commonly visited on a combined ticket with the Bronze Age Nuraghe Palmavera nearer Alghero, giving a clear before-and-after view of the island's prehistory. Set among vineyards in the Alghero hinterland, the necropolis is modestly conserved and quietly atmospheric, its carved chambers preserved by the durable sandstone into which generations of Neolithic and Copper Age Sardinians cut their houses for the dead.