Bleeding rocks and stone altars by the sea

Sardinia is a master of illusion. Just when you think you’ve figured it out and are expecting yet another idyllic white beach with a gentle slope into the water, it decides to hit you right in the face with brutality in its purest form. You arrive on the coast and suddenly realise that the scenery around you looks as though someone had torn off a massive chunk of Mars and hurled it into the Mediterranean with a loud crash.

Welcome to Arbatax, home of the famous Rocce Rosse.

A scar on the coastline This place does not invite you to relax; it commands respect. When you stand before these massive, jagged spires of red porphyry, you feel the power of time and the elements. The rocks rise vertically from the deep navy-blue water, and their rusty, blood-red colour contrasts strikingly with the blue of the sky. They look like a massive, gaping wound on the earth’s body, from which the water has washed away everything soft, leaving only a hard, jagged skeleton.

Take a look at one of the photos – nature has carved a perfect, square window into a massive rock face. The light streaming through it and the silhouettes of people resemble a scene from a science-fiction film, as if it were a portal to a completely different reality.

Black scars and the anatomy of stone Descending onto the rocks themselves is a truly mesmerising experience. The surface you tread upon is not uniform. It is a cracked, raw armour. The flat platforms of light-coloured rock are brutally cut through by thick, black veins of minerals. These dark streaks look like deep scars from ancient geological battles, when the earth cracked open and spewed forth boiling lava. As you walk across it, you can feel beneath your feet the brutal history of this planet, etched into the stone.

The silent guardians of Arbatax But there is something else here. Something that lends this place an incredible, mystical weight. People.

When you look out along the coastline, you’ll see hundreds of tiny mounds, arranged with perfect precision. Stone upon stone, defying gravity and the wind. They look like primitive altars, silent guardians left behind by travellers. There is a kind of primal psychology at work here – the irrational human need to leave a fleeting mark, a part of oneself, in a place that is so powerful and which will surely outlive us by millions of years.

We, too, left our gaze there before moving on in search of further mysteries of this enigmatic island.