Villasimius

I got to Villasimius by accident, really — a rental car detour off the main Cagliari road that turned into three unplanned days. The town itself is unassuming, a low grid of streets a few kilometers back from the coast, built around a fishing and tuna-processing economy that has mostly given way to summer tourism without fully forgetting what it used to be. The old Torre Vecchia still stands watch over the harbor, a squat 16th-century Spanish watchtower built to spot Barbary corsairs, back when this coastline needed spotting for.

Capo Carbonara and the Color Problem

The real business of Villasimius happens at Capo Carbonara, the protected headland and marine reserve at the peninsula’s tip. Spiaggia del Riso gets its name — “rice beach” — from grains of quartz so fine and pale they genuinely resemble rice scattered across the sand, and the water above it does something to light that I still can’t fully explain: pale green in the shallows, then a hard turquoise, then a navy so deep it looks like a different sea entirely, all within fifty meters of shoreline. I swam out past the where-it-changes-color line one September morning and just floated there for twenty minutes, doing nothing, which is not something I do often.

Porto Giunco and the Flamingos

A short walk south, Porto Giunco splits into two facing beaches on either side of a slim isthmus, with the old Torre di Porto Giunco standing at the point between them — you can stand at the tower and watch waves break on two different coastlines simultaneously. Behind the beach, the Stagno di Notteri lagoon hosts a resident population of flamingos that seem entirely unbothered by the swimmers thirty meters away. I watched a group of maybe forty of them wade and preen in perfect indifference to a beach volleyball game happening on the other side of the dune. Nobody else on the sand seemed to find this remarkable, which somehow made it more so.

What’s Underwater

Capo Carbonara’s marine reserve status means the diving here is genuinely serious — not resort-brochure serious, actually serious. Boats run out to Isola dei Cavoli and Secca dei Berni, where the visibility regularly exceeds twenty meters and the granite seafloor drops into canyons thick with gorgonian fans. I’m a mediocre snorkeler at best, but even from the surface near Cala Pira, a smaller cove tucked between headlands north of town, I could see schools of salema and the occasional curious grouper drifting below me in water so clear it barely felt like an obstruction.

When to go: Late June and September deliver warm water without August’s parking wars. The marine reserve boats run reliably from May through October; outside that window, the town settles back into its quieter, fishing-village rhythm, and the flamingos mostly have Porto Giunco to themselves.