Press Release

From Bell’Italia - March 1997
Hotel Le Dune . You arrive there at the end of a seven-kilometre dirt road and it is a surprise! It’s not without good reason if the complex has been declared a National Monument because of its artistic and historical value. To its restoration contributed the Cultural Assets Superintendency in Cagliari which supplied some period material used to adorn the façade and the external double lancet windows. Internal decoration and furnishings are beautiful and refined, altogether a place of great charm”

From: Grazia Moda- June 1996
“In a Mine on the Dunes – You cannot help but negotiate a seven-kilometre-long dirt road to reach this paradise but it’s worth your while! You will be struck by this still little known corner of Sardinia where the landscape is quite similar to a piece of African land with its sand dunes, century-old junipers and kilometres of empty beaches.
The hotel, which looks like a small fortress in the desert, (the manager is a former colonel in the Italian army and the Italian Flag flutters in the wind), has been built out of a thousand-year-old eighteenth-century complex…
You cannot resist the African charm of the dunes and you can’t help walking along the trails among junipers where you could not rule out the possibility of running into wild deer”.

From L’Unione Sarda – July 1994
“The dunes of Piscinas are undoubtedly  the jewels of this part of the island called The Green Coast in south-western Sardinia…
The sand dunes are fantastic, real hills  that imitate a desert landscape dotted with small juniper thickets  where wild deer can easily be seen.
The golden, almost endless beaches are set against the blue of a very clean sea and several fine ruddy shades difficult to make out. They are the signs of the industrial past of the territory: along a small road that leads to the sea, there used to run a small train loaded with minerals extracted further inland and which was unloaded near a stone building, now transformed into a comfortable hotel”
A short trip across the dunes is a must! Just before reaching the sea, on the left, you will find a slope, almost a corridor through the junipers. At the end of the slope you come to the edge of a vast sandy expanse almost flat that seems endless.“

From Il Borghese – July 1998
“Holidays in a Mine – Are you fed up with the usual, run-of-the-mill hotels? Then this is the hotel for you! It’s a normal-looking hotel but with a very interesting feature, it  has been built in a mining warehouse and its entrance is the tunnel through which wagons loaded with minerals once ran. On the walls are niches dug in the rock where rare minerals extracted in the area are on show.
And all this among hundreds-of year-old junipers, dunes tens of metres tall, the tallest in Europe, some of them about 70 metres, and wonderful wild beaches…

Sette -Corriere della Sera
Ideas and notes on enjoying life- On the Dunes of Sardinia, it is the hideaway patronized by intellectuals and writers from all over Europe, the charming hotel Le Dune, in Sardinia, located on the wild south-western coast of the island. It is surrounded by the sandy valley of Piscinas called “The Little Sahara Desert of Sardinia”. For those who love the seaside in winter and look for an exclusive and minimal chic environment”

I will lead you out of the night-
Written at le Dune Hotel in the winter of  1997-98 by writer-journalist Giampaolo Pansa. In the centre of Paris there lives Angela Mercier, a young woman with a mischievous body and determined eyes. One day in February 1997, Angela hears that in Italy a famous journalist, Bruno Viotti, is missing. Many think he is dead, but the girl, driven by a reason only she knows about, sets off in search of  him…an unknown force, only destiny drives her to land in Sardinia, on the coast of the mining area of Ingurtosu, between the dunes of Piscinas, an immense altar erected by the wind, and the gloomy castle of Ingurtosu.
The writer is able to blend fiction with the story of a never ending massacre from Piazza Fontana to the Red Brigades.

Bianca Berlinguer - journalist
Walk down a winding dirt road, between crumbling small houses, and then the abandoned mining area of  Ingurtosu and then woods again,  wade a stream and then suddenly you will  find yourselves before impressive, snow-white dunes. It is Piscinas. There is a small hotel owned by a former colonel whose dreams have come true: he was the manager of the mine’s son, he has returned to where he spent his childhood and he has transformed  a crumbling warehouse on the sea shore into a haven for himself, his friends and the tourists who venture as far as that. Here nobody has ever hurt nature. At night, small herds of wild deer come to graze near the hotel.


Dove – June 2003 Marina Poggi
Mine of sunshine. Long strips of sand , interrupted by tall cliffs, huge solitary dunes made of golden powder, that move under the gusts of the mistral… The Green Coast, washed by a sea of  Caribbean colours. ..
The inland area is full of woods, pinewoods, mountains with bizarre profiles, surreal neo-gothic palaces, art nouveau architecture, villages that played an important role in the mining epic, then a dirt road…the first impressive golden dunes… a few rusty wagons bear witness to the fact that here the railway ended…on the beach, before the wharf no longer in use, a sculpture by Pietro Cascella, “The Sun Altar”, a few feet from the seashore, before, The Hotel Le Dune, restored mining warehouses which look more like a seaside residence,  a meeting place for friends with many regular customers and some new entry, rather than a hotel.
…Period furniture and new decors, an art nouveau glass cabinet, …a big reception desk which was once in  an old chemist’s shop, bedrooms with blue-tiled floors and bamboo furniture, a few good eighteenth-century pieces…

Panorama –June 2003- (Alfonso Signorini)
Tired of  splendid villas, more refined and less facile are those of the other Sardinia, a large, discreet group of persons who repair to the dunes of Piscinas among holm-oaks and oaks, to the Hotel Le Dune, not a run-of-the-mill hotel but a national monument made out of an old blende and galena warehouse…it so happens that at suppertime on the terrace before the sea, the exclusive customers applaud the sunset and then, at 11 o’clock, everybody to bed without TV.

Corriere della Sera – August 14th 2003 (Marcello Floris)
The most beautiful beaches near the mines/ Piscinas and the tallest dunes in Europe. Once they were industries / Ingurtosu and Montevecchio extracted zinc, lead and silver in the first half of the twentieth century. Today it is an Eden. UNESCO declared it “the first geological, mining, historical and natural park in the world”. On the charming beach of Piscinas, near linden trees and wild orchids instead of the old warehouses, among the dead-end rails half  buried in the sand, there is one hotel, Le Dune!

Flair (sic!) Living – September 2003- Rifugi (Laura Ogna)
Kilometres of beaches that look on a sea of a thousand blues, majestic dunes that turn golden at sunset…In a hidden and unexpected oasis on the western coast of Sardinia, between the sea and the sand, there lies The Hotel Le Dune looking on ten kilometres of empty beaches with endless dunes at the back and incredible sunsets that perform before the few customers of the resort.