tharros
 
Many people go to Oristano just to visit the Punic and Roman ruins at Tharros , twenty-odd kilometres from Oristano and served by two ARST buses daily. Like Nora, Tharros is pitched on a limb of land surrounded by water, though in this case it's a clenched fist, dominated by a sturdy Spanish watchtower. The peninsula forms part of the mouth of the Golfo di Oristano and was settled by Phoenicians as early as 800 BC. Tharros grew under Carthaginian occupation and then, after 238 BC, was revitalized by the Romans, who furnished it with the baths and streets that you see today. The town was finally abandoned in 1070 in favour of the more secure Oristano, then a small village.

The site (daily: 9am-1hr beofre sunset; L8000/¬4.13) consists mostly of Punic and Roman houses arranged on a grid of streets, of which the broad-slabbed Decumanus Maximus is the most impressive. Another, the Cardo Maximus, has a deep open sewer visible alongside it. But the things you'll notice immediately on entering the site are the solitary remnants of a first-century BC Roman temple, with only two of its four Corinthian columns still upright. There are also baths and fragments of mosaics from the Roman city, and a wall and remains of a tophet from the earlier Punic settlement. Like Nora, there is much more submerged underwater, as a result of subsidence.

Near the site stands the fifth-century church of San Giovanni di Sinis , which vies with Cágliari's San Saturno for the title of oldest Christian church in Sardinia. Further back up the road towards Oristano (signposted off the Tharros road) is the sanctuary of San Salvatore , whose main interest is in a subterranean fourth-century chamber dedicated to Mars and Venus, complete with faded frescoes of Venus, Cupid and Hercules - ask the custodian to let you see it. The sanctuary forms the focus of a wild festival on the first weekend of September, the main feature of which is a race run at dawn to the village of Cabras , 8km away, by the town's boys. Barefoot and clad in white shirts and shorts, they bear aloft the statue of San Salvatore in a re-enactment of a frantic rescue mission undertaken four centuries ago to save the saint from Moorish attackers.