Sardinia North Coast Road Trip: Olbia to Alghero (3 Days)

Sardinia’s north coast is 228 kilometres of granite and water between two airports, which makes it one of the easiest island drives in Europe to organise and one of the harder ones to leave. The rock here is older than the Alps, wind-carved into shapes that look deliberate, and the sea is the colour people assume is a filter.

Day 1 — Olbia to Palau through the Costa Smeralda (65 km)

North from Olbia into the Costa Smeralda, invented in the 1960s by a consortium that bought the coast, wrote a building code and made it stick — which is why there are no towers here, only low stone and juniper.

Porto Cervo is the centre of it and worth an hour, mostly to see what that much money looks like when it agrees to be quiet. The beaches on the way north are the point.

Sleep in Palau, which is a working port rather than a resort.

Day 2 — La Maddalena and the north shore to Castelsardo (95 km)

Ferries leave Palau for the La Maddalena archipelago all day and take about twenty minutes; you can take the car, and the islands are joined to each other by a causeway.

Back on the mainland the road runs west past Santa Teresa Gallura, close enough to see Corsica across the strait on a clear day, then along a coast of wind-shaped rock to Castelsardo — a town stacked under a Doria castle on a headland.

Day 3 — Down to Alghero and Capo Caccia (68 km)

South-west to Alghero, which spent four centuries under the Crown of Aragon and still speaks a Catalan dialect on its street signs. The old town is walled, flat and made for walking off a long drive.

Finish at Capo Caccia west of town, where the cliff drops into the sea and the road along the top is the last good one of the trip.

The island has no toll roads

Not one. Sardinia has no motorways at all — the network is superstrade, free state roads with limits up to 110 km/h, and the SS131 spine runs the length of the island without a booth on it.

This is worth saying because mainland Italy is the opposite: the autostrada charges per kilometre through a ticket-and-barrier system, and a driver who has done Rome to Naples reasonably expects the same. Here you pay for fuel and nothing else.

Getting the car here

Both ends of this route have an airport, so renting on the island is the simple option. Bringing your own means a ferry from Genoa, Livorno or Civitavecchia to Olbia or Porto Torres — an overnight crossing, and one that books out months ahead for August.

What it costs

Use the cost calculator to price fuel and nights for your exact dates. With no tolls, the variable costs are fuel, beds — which swing hard between the Costa Smeralda in August and Castelsardo in May — and the La Maddalena ferry if you take the car across.