Olbia historical timeline

Olbia is much older than it looks and spent a very long stretch of its history as almost nothing at all.

The ancient port

Founded by Carthage, and possibly by Greeks before that, Olbia became a substantial Roman harbour on the route between Italy and the island. Roman warships and merchantmen sunk in the gulf — some apparently scuttled during a Vandal raid — were found in the harbour mud during works in the 1990s and are now in the museum.

Terranova

After Rome the town shrank. It was Byzantine, then part of the giudicato of Gallura, then Pisan and Aragonese, and for centuries it was called Terranova Pausania. The name Olbia was restored only in 1939.

Malaria

This is the fact that explains everything else. The coastal lowlands of Gallura were malarial, and remained so into the twentieth century. The population stayed small, the coast stayed empty, and land near the sea was worth very little. A post-war eradication campaign in the late 1940s cleared the anopheles mosquito from Sardinia, and only then did this coastline become habitable in any modern sense.

The Costa Smeralda

In 1962 a consortium led by the Aga Khan IV began buying that cheap, empty coast north of Olbia and developing it under tight architectural control. Porto Cervo and the resorts around it created one of the most expensive coastlines in the Mediterranean within a generation, and made Olbia its airport.

1943

Allied bombing hit the port heavily, which is why the centre is largely post-war.