Alghero historical timeline

Alghero's history turns on a single event in 1354 that changed who lived here.

Genoese foundation

The town was founded in the twelfth century by the Doria, a Genoese family, as a fortified port on a coast they wanted to control. It passed back and forth between Genoese and Aragonese hands through the fourteenth century.

1354

After a long siege, the Aragonese king Peter IV took the town. The existing population was expelled or left, and Alghero was repopulated with settlers from Catalonia, chiefly from the area around Barcelona. It became a Catalan colony in a Sardinian island — a royal town, garrisoned and walled, deliberately kept separate from the countryside around it.

That separation is why the language survived. For centuries Catalan was spoken inside the walls and Sardinian outside them, and the town was known as Barceloneta, little Barcelona.

Spanish centuries

Under Spain the walls and bastions were rebuilt against artillery, and Alghero remained a fortified garrison town, prosperous on coral and trade.

Charles V

In 1541 the emperor Charles V put in at Alghero with his fleet on the way to Algiers. He is said to have looked at the town from the bastion and pronounced it handsome and well set, and to have told the assembled citizens that they were all gentlemen. Whether or not he said it, the town has quoted him ever since, and the bastion he stood on carries his name.

Savoy and after

The island passed to the House of Savoy in 1720 and the town slowly opened up. The walls on the landward side were demolished in the nineteenth century; those facing the sea were kept and are now the promenade.

Modern

Land reclamation in the 1930s created the planned town of Fertilia nearby, settled first by farmers from the Veneto and Ferrara and after the war by Italian refugees from Istria and Dalmatia. Tourism arrived with the airport from the 1960s.