Roccia dell'Elefante

A hulking red-brown boulder sits right on the roadside outside Castelsardo and it genuinely looks like an elephant crouching in the grass. This is Roccia dell'Elefante, a huge block of trachyte and andesite that broke away from the Monte Castellazzu rock formation and rolled into the valley below, where wind and rain carved it into its current animal silhouette over millennia. Before anyone called it an elephant, locals knew it as "Sa Pedra Pertunta" (the pierced stone), a reference to its unusual shape. Standing about four metres tall, the rock is located in Castelsardo's Multeddu area, at km 4.3 of the state road 134 to Sedini, in the Anglona district of northwest Sardinia. The same road passes the nuraghe Paddaggiu, whose main tower stands almost nine metres high with an eleven-metre diameter, originally part of a complex including a bastion with two secondary towers and an outer wall enclosing several huts.