Sardinia, Coast to Coast

Flying in one end, out the other

Most island trips fall into an obvious pattern: fly in, base yourself somewhere, fly out the same way you came. Our Sardinia trip, from June 27 to July 5, 2025, didn’t work like that at all. We flew into Olbia in the northeast and out of Cagliari in the south, which meant the whole nine days became a genuine coast-to-coast road trip rather than a single-base holiday, with five very different stops strung between the two airports.

The glossy northeast: Costa Smeralda

We started where a lot of visitors to Sardinia start, on the Costa Smeralda in the island’s northeast — a stretch of coastline that’s genuinely upscale, long associated with yachts, celebrity visitors, and some of the most photographed turquoise water in the Mediterranean. We stayed first in Cannigione at the AHR Baja Hotel & Spa, then moved to nearby Palau and the Felix Hotels – Residence Hotel Costa Serena. Both towns sit right on this glamorous stretch of coast, and both make sensible bases for exploring the Maddalena archipelago just offshore, along with the beaches the Costa Smeralda built its reputation on.

A university city with none of the polish

From there we turned inland and west to Sassari, staying at Album Boutique Rooms, and the contrast with the coast we’d just left was immediate. Sassari is a real working university city rather than a resort town, with none of the Costa Smeralda’s glossy tourist infrastructure and a much more ordinary, lived-in Sardinian atmosphere as a result. It’s the kind of stop that doesn’t show up on many first-time Sardinia itineraries, and that’s exactly what made it worth including — a look at the island away from its most photographed coastline.

Bosa and its pastel houses

Continuing down the west coast brought us to Bosa, where we stayed at Domo ’e sa rosa. Bosa is a genuinely striking riverside town, its old quarter built up the hillside in a cascade of brightly painted pastel houses beneath the ruins of a hilltop castle, with the Temo river running out to the sea below. It’s a much quieter, more traditional kind of beautiful than the Costa Smeralda’s polish, and for us it was one of the clearest arguments for doing this trip as a coast-to-coast route rather than staying put in the northeast the whole time.

An inland stop before the south

We broke up the final push south with a night in Marrùbiu, at La Vecchia Dimora, in the west-central part of the island. Stops like this one don’t always make it into a trip write-up, but they’re part of what makes a one-way route across an island actually work logistically — a sensible overnight break rather than a long single push from Bosa all the way to the south coast.

Ending at Chia’s lagoons

The trip closed out in Chia, near Cagliari in the south, where we stayed at the Conrad Chia Laguna Sardinia. Chia’s coastline is built around a series of lagoons behind its beaches, giving the area a genuinely different landscape from anywhere else we’d stopped — dunes, shallow lagoon water, and beaches that feel considerably wilder than the manicured Costa Smeralda coves we’d started the trip on.

Sardinia isn’t just Italy with better beaches

One thing that struck us across all five stops is how culturally distinct Sardinia feels from mainland Italy. The island has its own language, Sardo, still spoken alongside Italian, along with its own culinary traditions and a general sense of identity that doesn’t simply read as a regional variation on the mainland. Driving across it end to end, rather than flying over most of it, made that distinctiveness much more apparent than a single-resort stay ever would have.

A car is essential, not optional

None of this route works without a rental car. Public transport between towns like Cannigione, Sassari, Bosa, and Marrùbiu is sparse at best, and a one-way, coast-to-coast itinerary like ours depends entirely on having your own vehicle and the flexibility to stop wherever the coastline or a hill town catches your eye along the way.

[Editor’s note: add what each of these five stops meant to you along the way, and swap in your own photos once you have them.]