Sardinia 2010 – Perda Longa (25th July)

Perda Longa is a famous rock monolith, located in Ogliastra province near the town of Baunei. There are two ways you can use to get there: 1) a road leading there from SS 125 near Baunei; 2) a beautiful path going there along the coast from Santa Maria Navarrese. Naturally, for our hike we used the second one.

Perda Longa

Our camp in Tancau we left at 8:50. Way to the starting point was very short, since our today’s trip started once again on the square in Santa Maria Navarrese. There we arrived at 9 o’clock and immediately set out for the hike. At first we went along the via Perda Longa road and after about 700 meters we got to the narrow path, leading us along the coast to the north.

The path was very nice, offering nice views of the coast and surrounded by macchia (typical Mediterranean bush vegetation). On some places there were are also higher trees, with quite an interesting fruit on them. I recognized neither the tree nor the fruit, so I just took photo of it – I’ll post the photo into this article, if you by any chance happen to know what tree/fruit it is, please let me know.

Unknown fruit

Sometimes on the rocky ground there was a little problem to see where to go. One particular place was a bit tricky – while the path seemed to go to the east along the steep hillside (where the path was really narrow, which made going there a little risky), in reality it went directly up the hill (to the north). I marked this place as a waypoint and you can download it together with other waypoints into your GPS.

Perda Longa rock is a very photogenic, so I was stopping very often to take photos – I can’t even count how many of them I took, I just know that at home I had to delete most of them:-). We arrived to the rock shortly before the noon. At first we went to the beach located to the north of monolith, but since it was full of people (who went to the rock by car) and it was paid, we turned back and went to the cliffs located just to the south of monolith. After having a short break (and of course, taking a few photos) we set out for the way back. I liked this trip a lot and once again recommend it to everyone.

Santa Maria Navarrese (from the way to Pedra Longa)

Two last notes: First, there is an earthcache GC26GMX Perda Longa – Baunei devoted to the monolith. To log it, you should take photo of you in front of the monolith and answer correctly a few questions about it.

The second one, there is a little “problem” with the name of the rock: while I use here the name PERDA Longa, sometimes you can see it written like PEDRA Longa. If you try to do the Google search of both these variants you’ll notice that for both searches you’ll get similar number of results (293 000 for Perda Longa and 298 000 for Pedra Longa). According to Italian Wikipedia article about the monolith, the both variants can probably be used. I decided to use the first one (despite the fact that Google suggests the other one), because its used on the (English) information board near the rock itself and also in the official Italian list of natural reservations, that is linked from the aforementioned Wikipedia entry.

As usally, here’s a link to the GPX file containing the track record.

You can also look at the elevation diagram of the track (generated by GPS altimeter and processed by Garmin Basemap application). Please click to the miniature to see the diagram in a full size.

Elevation diagram - trip to Perda Longa and back

And last but not least here’s the list of some important waypoints. You can download all of them in one GPX file.