Antiche Terme di Sardara

The baths at Sardara have been working since 1898, in the locality of Santa Maria Aquas just west of the village, and they stand on much older ground: a nuraghe in the park, and the remains of the Roman baths called Aquae Neapolitanae, which were built into the first modern Sardinian spa at the end of the 1890s. The temple there was later dedicated to Santa Maria ad Aquas, which gave the locality its name.

The water is thermal and comes from the ground: the operator describes rainfall that percolates thousands of metres down and re-emerges mineralised at 45 to 60 °C, classified “bicarbonato-alcalino-sodica, ipertermale” — bicarbonate-alkaline-sodium, hyperthermal — with a fixed residue of 2.64 grams per litre. Two pools are fed from it.

Day visitors do get in, but by booking rather than at a turnstile. Monday to Friday the pools run without a break from 9.00 to 19.30; on Saturday and Sunday they split into 9.00–12.30 and 14.00–19.30. Bathing under the stars runs 22.00–24.00 every night but Saturday. Day bookings, the operator states, are neither cancellable nor refundable.

A hotel, a restaurant, an eight-hectare park, a gym and a Thermarium with Finnish sauna and Turkish bath share the site. The treatment wing is run separately from the pools: according to the operator it is accredited with the Italian national health service for mud and bath therapy, inhalation cures and rhinogenous deafness, prescribed by a family doctor after a compulsory medical examination. For mud-bath therapy the operator lists osteoarthrosis, periarthropathies, fibromyalgia and after-effects of injury.