Santa Teresa Gallura - Capo Testa, Sardinia in May

Santa Teresa Gallura – Visiting Capo Testa

Capo Testa is one of our favourite places. A unique landscape modelled by the sea and the wind with the white cliffs of Bonifacio in the distance,  it has escaped development and is a profusion of flowers in spring. We spent a week in Santa Teresa di Gallura last year from mid-May and this year we've planned to arrive a little earlier on the 10th instead of the 17th. Just a few days but a big difference in terms of flowers we soon realise when we walk past the “Grooves on the rocks” bar at Capo Testa.

 It's a carpet of pastels. Pinks, mauves, soft yellows with a background of bluegreygreen shrubs that are difficult to even define but blend together perfectly in the late afternoon light. Red poppies delicate in the inevitable brisk breeze, because Capo Testa is a rocky promontory with a lighthouse, vie with their rarer and sturdier yellow cousins. 

All against a background of rocks sculpted by the sea and wind, a frozen people of anguish and delight a witch a magician a Pope a veiled mother reaching out for her child faces of surprise and anguish or just plain grumpy mixed with a Noah's ark of animals from seals to the elephant, cows, dogs......

After supper we return for the sunset, a little cloudy but never a disappointment.

On Sunday morning we go back to take photos because it's sunny and the flowers are at their very best. First, we keep right towards Corsica and the Fortino and the area below and explore, up and down and across the rocks and along some paths and back round and everywhere views and flowers and sculptures.

Back up on the main track we go left, down to Cala Francese, an easy path just before the first low building before the steps up to the abandoned building and viewpoint. It’s an easy walk although there are several more complicated paths to reach it, and people only start arriving just as we are ready to go back to the apartment to get some lunch.

After lunch on the terrace, we relax a little and in the afternoon go to Valle della luna. The path to go there starts on the left at the highest point of the tarmac road from Santa Teresa towards the end of the promontory, just after the last houses. It’s an easy ‘hike’ among boulders and flowers. Valle della luna used to be ‘inhabited’ and it looks like one or two of the caves have some temporary dwellers, but nowhere near as many as when we visited over ten years ago.

It's Sunday afternoon but there's only a handful of people, a woman snorkeling in the emerald water, a group of boys smoking ‘something’ and chatting. It's quiet and the landscape is stunning. We sit for a while then take the longer way back ending on the road to some villas which joins the main road at Rena di Ponente beach.

In the evening the sunset, milder, but always some people to admire it.