"A charming atmosphere, in timeless surroundings, in the midst of uncontaminated sand dunes, against the drop of a deep blue sea, there appears a large grey stone building covered in golden plaster."
Thus an Italian journalist described her arrival at Hotel Le Dune and her discovery of the sandy valley at Piscinas.
The Hotel is the result of a valuable renovation of a nineteenth-century mining warehouse where Blende and Galena were stored, brought by train from Naracauli’s lavery near Ingurtosu, ancient mine town once prosper and flourishing and now silent and abandoned.
The sight is one of great natural beauty and a subtle melancholy spell takes one when walking under the arch of the splendid, though now abandoned, Manager’s Building, built in 1875 and designed by German engineer Georg Bornemann as a copy .of a Castle of his homeland in Saxon. Proceed from Ingurtosu toward the valley bottom along 7 km of unmade road in the middle of holm-oak woods and sweet-smelling juniper, following the old mine railway with its traces showing here and there. In an enchanted stillness of a ghost landscape, is not rare to meet the Sardinian Deers, being this valley their home.
In 1985 the Ministry for Cultural Assets declared the hotel a national monument for its particular historical interest and artistic value.
It consists of three buildings joined together by a little piazza looking on to the sea and a beautiful patio paved in eighteenth-century’s terracotta tiles.
The main building, the largest of the three and once a blende warehouse, consists of a hall built out of a schist tunnel which leads customers to the Reception Office open 24 hours a day, to the American Bar with its Lounge embellished by the big fireplace in Sardinian granite stone, to the TV Room and to the 15 double Superior Rooms, which can be made into triple or quadruple.
In the central building, once used as stables for the horses that drew the wagons with mineral to the loading dock, eleven double Rooms with bathrooms were built together with a picturesque patio paved with eighteenth-century terracotta tiles and where Punic and Roman archaeological finds are kept.
The third building, the one nearer the sea, the former Galena storage, locates the Suite, a first floor apartment with scenic view over Piscinas beach and Dunes. On ground floor, the Restaurant with its Terrace on the beach and the Meeting Room.
The blissful location of the hotel makes it possible for our guests to easily reach the most important archaeological sites and natural parks in Central and Southern Sardinia, driving along some of the most beautiful and panoramic roads in Sardinia.