Sardinia's Mine
Sardinia, March 2006

...we needed to escape from the foggy grey landscape of the Po Plain and from the routine of the office work, and then we had the idea of renting a van, taking  a ferry  to Sardinia and dedicating  nearly one week to a mineralogical trip in Sardinia, the mineralogical “Mecca” of Italy.

Therefore the trip has been realized with the punctual organization of Giovanni, the technical support of Gianfranco and Paolo... and simply the participation of Carlo.  The trip has been focused on the quarries close to Osilo and some other classical mineralogical localities of the northern Sardinia, privileging the effusive rocks  not sufficiently valued for the important Zeolitic specimens  that  have been found in the past  and that potentially can still be found in good samples...  The ferry cruise from Genoa takes about all the night and has been very pleasant.

Useless to say that in the morning as soon as the necessary equipment has been disembarked from the ferry  we immediately moved to Osilo, the most famous locality in the area and his quarries where we have worked that day and the subsequent days with good findings.

A view from Osilo	Crastu Muradu Quarry

Some other days we made some other visits to other classical localities, firstly Monastir ( see the dedicated article ), the quarries of Arci Mt. the volcanic rocks  in the Bosa area . With the  exception of Monastir, all the quarries are not anymore active and can be visited asking the authorization to the land owners .

Monastir Quarry	Monte Arci Quarry
Zeolitesw on the road Alghero - Bosa

In the area of Osilo both the Crastu Muradu Quarry and the more famous Capurru quarry, very famous for the amethyst quartz, are not anymore active since a long time but can still reserve some surprise to the mineralogist.

looking for minerals

The weather has always been very nice and we have been impressed by the number of mineralogist that we have found during these days: we have met several mineral collectors that have informed us about the new recent findings in the area and gave some interesting indications.

The evenings we had a lot of discussions, projects about future trips and other ideas, long and good dinners and, finally, sleeping after a day of hard work on the rocks.

...our car and our team

At the end of this experience we had the van full with flats of minerals, a lot ideas to be developed in the next future, the sight of some local collections with remarkable specimens and the knowledge that most of the visited areas are still very rich in minerals and can reserve some important surprises

Nuraghe	Bosa
countryside	The Sardinian coast