From a small hill, it stands with all its immensity, dominating the Tirso Valley: it is one of the largest and best-preserved Bronze Age monuments in central Sardinia. The nuraghe Santa Barbara - with the same name as that of Macomer – stands in the locality of Tanca sa Cresia, in the territory of Villanova Truschedu, a small village twenty kilometres from Oristano: you can get to it from the provincial road SP 9, which passes by the ancient Sanctuary of San Gemiliano, after crossing a bridge over the river and walking along a short path. It is a shining example of an ‘a tancato’ building, consisting of two circular towers, a larger original one and a smaller one that was added later, connected by a curtain wall that encloses a courtyard, bordered by embedded stones.

You can enter the main tower through an architraved entrance and a corridor which has a spiral staircase on the left and a niche on the right. You will notice the care taken in the architecture: rows of overlapping concentric rings of basalt and trachyte blocks that narrow towards the top. The internal room, a good seven metres in diameter, is closed by a tholos vault that is almost intact, in which two opposing niches were created. In the middle of the floor you will see a fireplace and, at the top of the wall, another staircase leading to a small secondary cell. The room was used for divinatory practices: it can be assumed that the priest went up the main staircase to the first floor and, at the top, he entered into spiritual contact with the divinity, allowing himself to be possessed, after which he went down the ‘smaller’ staircase to transfer the divine will to the worshipper. The Santa Barbara can be considered a case of ‘theophany’: thanks to the shape of the stones, the light filtering in through the window over the entrance architrave projects the figure of a bull protome (symbol of the Bull god) where the altar was probably positioned. In the captivating light effect on the days of the winter solstice and the mid-southern lunistice, the Nuragic people saw the manifestation of the divinity. In front of the main tower, there is the entrance to the secondary one, built using a similar construction method but much smaller, perhaps a service room equipped with six slits that allowed the recirculation of air, used as a bronze forge or furnace. The building ‘towered’ at the top, an indication of an epochal socio-religious change in the Nuragic civilisation in the Final Bronze Age (end of the 1st millennium BC), also due to an astronomical change, meaning the progressive sinking of the stars of the Centaurus-Southern Cross, a constellation towards which the Nuragic towers of the mid-2nd millennium BC were pointing. It was the collapse of a cosmic order that they had believed in for thousands of years. The nuraghi were cut at the top to let in the light, an action linked to the sun worship of Sardus Pater, that, together with the worship of the waters, replaced the Mother Goddess, for which dark spaces were instead used. Outside the complex, you will see the foundations of circular huts with several rooms around courtyards, to which other quadrangular rooms from the Roman and early medieval periods were added. The name Santa Barbara itself calls to mind the existence of a Byzantine (or later) sanctuary. The artefacts from the site are kept in the exhibition room of the nuraghe Losa in Abbasanta. The Villanova area has a high concentration of nuraghi: Crabu, Domingu Porru, Jana, Nuragheddu, Pischina Andria, San Gemiliano, Zoppianu and Ruinas, which is also the name of the historic village centre in memory of the ruins of a Roman village.