An estate dating to the late XIX century has, over the decades, morphed from being a farming estate to a nature oasis with a verdant garden featuring a wide variety of plant species. Set over four hectares among the hills of Marghine and the Campeda high plain, it is the legacy left by a Welsh engineer who came to Sardinia in 1863 to help design the (Cagliari-Olbia and Chilivani-Porto Torres) railroad line that was being built by the Italian-English company known as the Royal Sardinian Railroad Company. The celebrated figure was Benjamin Piercy, a rich and powerful man who fell in love with Sardinia, where fortune smiled on him until he collapsed during a banquet and died in 1888. In exchange for the work on the largest public works done (until then) in Sardinia he received several terrains in the Bolotana area. There he invested more than a million lire, a vast fortune in those days, to construct a modern company that was defined a “monument to agriculture.”

On the premises of the Badde Salighes estate (the Valley of the Willows) he built a majestic English style villa, his residence, where he lived in luxury and lavishly entertained fellow Brits and Italian friends. They say that Umberto of Savoy, the soon to be King of Italy, was a frequent guest.