Costa Smeralda by Lee Marshall

Featured Hotel in Costa Smeralda/Porto Cervo

Romazzino

"Sardinia's Costa Smeralda is not short of fabulous beachside boltholes, but this one is friendlier than most, without compromising on style."

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A tumble and a loll of warm pink granite, as if the earth had decided, in this distant corner of a burnt island, to go topless. On the exposed granite, topless bathers bask like lizards. A safe distance out at sea, men with bottomless credit limits talk on mobile phones or lurk inside their yachts, watching satellite TV, toying with the latest model.

Few stretches of the Mediterranean coast look as good as the Costa Smeralda, a purpose-built millionaire's paradise on the rugged north-eastern coast of Sardinia. But the video-fuelled masses who descend on the resorts to view the evening passeggiata through a handycam are not here for the scenery. They want celebrities, celebrity boyfriends, TV starlets. Most of the latter are here to be looked at: it's a symbiotic relationship. The truly famous make a show of wanting to be left alone; but nobody believes them. Why come to the Costa Smeralda, summer HQ of Italy's paparazzi, if you want privacy? You'd be better off at Tooting Bec Lido.



Though it is the done thing, on the Costa Smeralda, to ignore the geology, the geology has a way of imposing itself. The long sandy sweeps of the French Riviera offer themselves up entirely, submissively, to Mediterranean beach culture, with its parasols, its all-over tans, its boring, endless games of beach tennis. But the granite knubs and whorls of the Costa Smeralda resist the invasion. In this wild corner of Sardinia, the human overlay feels fragile, temporary. Huge blocks of grantite that were forced to the surface 350 million years make even a flame-red Ferrari look irrelevant.

History plays a part in this. Compared to the French Riviera - which is the Olduvai gorge of Sunbathing Man - the Costa Smeralda is a babe in arms. Until the early 1960s, this coast was pure, unadulterated nature: sea and rocks, prickly pears, stone pines and juniper, encircling the occasional sandy beach. Useless as farmland, next to useless for grazing; and the Sardinians, like many island tribes, never were very keen on fishing. So the land was given to the women as their portion, while the men owned more workable and more profitable tracts inland.

It would be nice to think that when Karim Aga Khan IV set up the Consorzio Costa Smeralda in 1962 and began to buy up five thousand hectares of coastline piece by piece, he made several Sardinian peasant women rich enough to wear the trousers. But the men, it seems, suddenly claimed the land back at the first whiff of serious money.



When the Aga Khan discovered this remote, romantic coast, it was known only to a select band of yachties - including the Fiat-owning (but not Fiat-driving) Agnellis. They would converge on the place each summer, moor their yachts in the limpid waters off Capriccioli or Cala di Volpe, and take it in turns to host parties on board or on beach. It must have been at one of these Dolce Vita dos that the idea of giving the scene a permanent land base was born. It was the obvious next step: here was a group of people with cash to spare, and there was one of the last truly virgin, beach-strewn sections of coast in the Mediterranean, which could be picked up for a song.

For a sixties development, the Costa Smeralda is remarkably sensitive. But it wasn't so much a dawning Green conscience that saved the place: it was the fact that the men who built it intended to live here. This was no quick-buck villa scheme for the hoi polloi; it was a serious attempt to found an earthly paradise for the very rich.

The consortium's rulesheet for those who intend to build on the Costa Smeralda is a forest of limitations. Villas, and the plants that surround them, have to be kept down to a certain height. Building stone and roof tiles have to conform to rigid specifications, and must be locally sourced. Even the roadsigns that mark localities or single properties must be made of granite.

But a Mediterranean Eden cannot live on villas alone. For the ready-built sections of the Costa - essentially the enclave's only real town, Porto Cervo, and the four hotels that were to launch its international image - the Aga Khan and his fellow directors called in three jetset architects: Italians Luigi Vietti and Michele Busiri Vici, and Frenchman Jacques Couelle. The result, in Porto Cervo, was a millionaire's mall disguised as a sanitised Mediterranean fishing village, with plenty of archways and staircases and cool loggias. Except that where you might expect a grocer's, or a bread shop, or a swarthy pescatore beating an octopus, there is an endless string of Pradas and Hermes, of chi-chi jewellers and estate agents too tasteful to display any prices. True, there is also one small supermarket - but the serious shoppers are outnumbered by the Italian tourists gawping at the price of pasta.

The Costa Smeralda is, in many ways, a state within a state. It has its own rubbish trucks, its own fire brigade, its own security guards. It is also fiercely protective of the Costa Smeralda brand name, which is often taken to refer to the whole coast between Olbia and Palau, rather than a strictly-defined 55 kilometre strip of coast between Cala Razza di Juncu and Liscia di Vacca. Even chi-chi Porto Rotondo, where Italian prime minster Silvio Berlusconi (the “workers' premier”, according to one campaign poster) holidays in a forty-room villa with two swimming pools, is not - I repeat not - a part of the Costa Smeralda.

The Aga Khan's not-quite-majority stake in what is essentially a huge condominium is now owned by the Starwood hotel group. But even this global giant has to listen up, at the annual stakeholders' meeting, to elderly dowagers complaining that the new parking bollards installed by the consortium clash horribly with their bouganvilea.



Its aura of monied privilege may make the idea of taking a holiday on the Costa Smeralda rather alarming for all but the very rich. It shouldn't: it's a shame to miss out on some of the Mediterranean's best beaches just because Pierce Brosnan and/or Julia Roberts are staying down the road.

Anyone wanting an overview of the area should take the road that winds up to the top of Monte Mora, highest of the granite peaks that dominate the rugged, ragged coast. Here, amidst a forest of antennae, I provided a welcome diversion for the dog of the man who keeps an eye out for forest fires and Saracen yacht invasions. But a few canine yaps and sniffs were a small price to pay for this view.

To the east, out beyond Olbia, rose the gaunt, austere, island of Tavolara, a knife's edge rising from the sea. Directly below was a dance of promontories and inlets, of peach granite rocks, white dabs of villa, tangles of greenery. And that turquoise sea, scarred white by the wakes of boats that, from this height, looked like slow shooting stars. Corsica was heat haze; but I could make out the islands of the Maddalena archipelago: La Maddalena, with its cargo of American sailors and their families, relaxing back into the navy's cushiest posting; and nearby Caprera, home to kestrels, wild orchids and, for the last twenty-five years of his life, Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Che Guevara of the nineteenth century.

When I told a Smeralda habituée that I had been up Monte Mora to look at the view, she was politely amazed. What an odd thing to do; yet she had heard, she now remembered, that the view was pretty. Had the view been pretty? Oh yes, I replied, bellissimo; and that reassured her a little. But it was clear that I had done a non-Smeralda thing.

The Smeralda thing is to stay inside one's villa, making the most of the swimming pool and (if one is very lucky) the private beach. Reasons for leaving one's villa are: a) to go to somebody else's villa; b) to go out in one's own or somebody else's yacht; c) to dine at the Costa Smeralda Yacht Club; d) to venture down to the Piazzetta in Porto Cervo, or Piazza San Marco in Porto Rotondo, when the cool of the evening has set in, in order to meet and greet and maybe have a small Campari; e) to head back to Milan or Rome as soon as, or preferably before, there is “nobody left”.

Curiously, going to the beach is a non-Smeralda thing - unless it's private, or accessible only by boat. The reason being that there is no social filtering: Costa Smeralda beaches are, God and the by-laws be praised, open to all. A little out of season, in June, say, or September, these breathaking coves offer some of the best swimming in the Mediterranean. Some, like Liscia Ruja, are well-known; others, such as Cala Pietra Bianca or the exquisite Poltu di li Cogghi (also known as the Spiaggia del Principe, the Prince's Beach), are protected from invasion by their distance from the nearest feasible parking space and by a total lack of signposting. A locally-produced guide to the area's beaches tells us that the path to Cala Pietra Bianca lies “between a gorse bush and a lentisc on the right and a small lentisc on the left”. You can't miss it.

But the most daringly non-Smeralda thing of all is to head inland. The Sardinia that lies just back from this charmed enclave is, to many smeraldini, the place where kidnap threats and ransom notes come from - or came from. It is also, though, a land of an exhilarating beauty, a frontier landscape, where drystone walls separate wild from wild, not wild from cultivated.

On hillocks trailing she-oaks, olives, myrtle and prickly pear, circular ruins rise up, like razed windmills. These are the nuraghi, patriarchal fortress-villages dating back to Sardina's flourishing Bronze Age. Even more impressive are the nuraghic tombs which survive in two localities near the town of Arzachena, at Li Lolghi and Coddu Vecciu. Locals dubbed these the “giant tombs”, because the long burial chamber and the tall, granite portal suggested superhuman dimensions; in reality, they were used and reused by all the members of a clan.

The relatives would sit for days by the entrance to the tomb, drugging their grief with halucinogenic mushrooms. I was reminded of this while sitting at a pavement table outside the Bar della Piazza in the mountain village of San Pantaleo: six kilometres as the crow flies from some of the most exclusive real estate on the Costa Smeralda.

The old man man opposite had finished his caffè long ago - perhaps last week - but still he sat, hands resting on the curve of his stick.When an acquaintance walked past, he looked up and said, as if commenting on the weather, “E' morto Romaldino”. The other gave a slight nod, and carried on. I watched this bringing-of-bad-tidings ritual three more times without discovering anything about who Romaldino was, or how he died.

Then I headed down for lunch at the Costa Smeralda Yacht Club.