“I could hardly believe my eyes, it was so like England, like Cornwall in the bleak parts, or Derbyshire uplands”. These are the impressions that David Herbert Lawrence described in Sea and Sardinia upon his arrival in Mandas (1921): “a shunting railway station - says the English writer - where these little trains stop, for a long and pleasant chat, after an arduous climb up the hills”. Today an agricultural and pastoral municipality with over two thousand inhabitants on the border between Campidano and Barbagia, the village was a narrow-gauge railway hub for a long time, which took you from Cagliari to the Mandrolisai and Ogliastra areas and is now a Trenino Verde tourist line: you will travel along panoramic tracks following in the footsteps of Lawrence, through cultivated hills, gorges, rock faces and the northeastern shore of Lake Mulargia.