Giulia BlocalOn Sardinia’s north-western coast, Argentiera is a former mining village where industrial ruins, a dramatic coastal landscape and contemporary art now overlap. I first came here drawn by the industrial archaeology, but what made the place particularly interesting to me was the way art was being used to reactivate spaces shaped by extraction, abandonment and depopulation.
Argentiera, Sardinia: from mining village to industrial heritage site
Argentiera developed around deposits of silver-bearing lead and zinc that had been known since antiquity, although large-scale mining shaped the village mainly between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When mining declined and eventually ceased, much of the settlement emptied out, leaving behind workers’ housing, industrial buildings and infrastructure scattered between the hills and the sea. When I visited, some of those traces still felt strikingly intact: abandoned houses, rusting shop signs and the remains of a place whose everyday life had once revolved around the mine.
The industrial landscape reaches all the way to the water. The former loading area faces Argentiera Cove, where mineral dust gives parts of the sand a greyish, metallic tone and the abandoned mining structures remain visible from the shore. Swimming there was one of the strongest memories of that trip, precisely because the landscape never separates neatly into nature on one side and industrial heritage on the other.
The visual landmark of the site is the former washery, an unusual timber structure in pitch pine, surrounded by engine houses and other remnants of the mining complex.
Argentiera belongs to a much larger mining landscape that stretches across Sardinia, where centuries of extraction have left an unusually dense concentration of mines, workers’ settlements and industrial structures. Today many of these sites form part of the Parco Geominerario Storico e Ambientale della Sardegna, which works to preserve and interpret this industrial and geological heritage.
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MAR-Miniera Argentiera: regenerating the former mine through art
The reuse of Argentiera has been developing for several years through a programme that combines cultural production with the recovery of the former mining settlement. Since 2017, LandWorks has been working in the village through workshops and regeneration projects, while MAR-Miniera Argentiera, launched in 2019, has gradually turned parts of the site into an open-air cultural space where industrial heritage, contemporary art and digital experimentation intersect.
The programme has produced a series of site-specific interventions, including an augmented-reality project developed around the history of the mining site and, in 2022, a large intervention by Sardinian artist Tellas across the steps of the new amphitheatre.
Tellas’ street art decorates the amphitheater created in the shadow of the former washery to host concerts, open-air movie nights, and more summer events.
The second life of the Argentiera mining site has just begun. Many buildings were fenced off when I visited, and I could hear all the cutting and drilling. The paint of Tellas’ artwork was still fresh, and the summer event program was about to kick off. I’m very curious to see how this place will transform in the coming years, especially how it will shape its new identity while, at the same time, staying rooted in the suggestive history of the place.
Update 2026: When I visited Argentiera in 2022, the transformation was still visibly underway. Several buildings were fenced off, construction work echoed across the former mining site and Tellas’ intervention on the amphitheatre had only just been completed.
Four years later, that process is still evolving. MAR has become an established part of Argentiera’s cultural life, while LandWorks continues to recover spaces within the village: in 2026, its workshops are focused on transforming the former “Discordia” into a new community space, visitor centre and bookshop for MAR.
What makes Argentiera worth returning to, for me, is therefore not simply the contrast between ruins and contemporary art. It is the ongoing question of what happens when a landscape built around extraction acquires a new cultural function, and how that new identity can develop without erasing the industrial history that made the place what it is.
