Skip to content

Sardinia Real Estate

Sardinia as a region: administration, geography, access

Last reviewed: August 2026

This page provides general information about buying property in Italy and does not replace legal or tax advice. The individual case is decided by a notary, tax adviser (commercialista), or lawyer on the ground.

Anyone considering a property in Sardinia meets a question that sounds trivial and is not: what exactly does this region consist of, administratively and geographically? This page describes how Sardinia is organised today — its metropolitan cities and provinces, its resident population, its coasts, mountains and national parks, and how the island is reached — and what that shape means for a property search. Every figure carries its reference date; the administrative layout in particular changed recently, and much material published elsewhere is out of date.

Metropolitan cities and provinces: the layout in force today

Since 17 July 2025 Sardinia's territory has been organised into two metropolitan cities and six provinces. The reform rests on regional law L.R. 7/2021, amended by L.R. 9/2023 and completed by the regional government's deliberation n. 36/34 of 9 July 2025, published in BURAS n. 39 of 17 July 2025. The eight units are:

  • Città metropolitana di Cagliari (ISTAT code 318)
  • Città metropolitana di Sassari (ISTAT code 312)
  • Provincia della Gallura Nord-Est Sardegna (ISTAT code 113)
  • Provincia di Nuoro (ISTAT code 114)
  • Provincia di Oristano (ISTAT code 115)
  • Provincia dell'Ogliastra (ISTAT code 116)
  • Provincia del Medio Campidano (ISTAT code 117)
  • Provincia del Sulcis Iglesiente (ISTAT code 119)

For all official statistics, the new units and their ISTAT codes are valid from 1 January 2026. Which comune belongs to which unit — and how many comuni each metropolitan city or province counts — follows from ISTAT's official code register for Sardinia's new territorial layout; this page deliberately quotes no comuni count of its own, because that register is the authoritative list.

Note the date: most maps, reference works and property portals still show the 2016 layout — the Città metropolitana di Cagliari plus the provinces of Sassari, Nuoro, Oristano and Sud Sardegna. That layout has been superseded since 17 July 2025; the provinces of Sassari and Sud Sardegna no longer exist as administrative units. Material that still lists them describes a past state (noted August 2026).

Resident population

Sardinia has 1,554,490 residents according to ISTAT's estimate at 1 January 2026.

A breakdown by the new metropolitan cities and provinces has not yet been published: at the same reference date, ISTAT still reports territorial figures by the pre-reform provinces. The five figures below therefore follow the old boundaries:

  • Sassari: 470,588 residents
  • Cagliari: 415,866 residents
  • Sud Sardegna: 327,170 residents
  • Nuoro: 194,081 residents
  • Oristano: 146,785 residents

All five figures are ISTAT estimates at 1 January 2026 for the pre-reform provinces. They cannot simply be re-partitioned onto the new metropolitan cities and provinces; as of August 2026, no official population figures for the new units had been published.

Coasts, mountains, national parks

Sardinia has about 1,850 kilometres of coastline — the figure used by the Region's own coastal agency, the Conservatoria delle Coste (page retrieved August 2026). For a property search this number matters less as geography than as law: the planning rules described below treat the coast as a legal category of its own.

The interior is mountainous. At the centre of the island lies the Gennargentu massif, whose Punta La Marmora (1,834 m) is Sardinia's highest peak. The Gennargentu is not a national park, whatever older material may suggest.

Two national parks operate in Sardinia: the Parco Nazionale dell'Asinara, established by decree of the President of the Republic of 3 October 2002 (5,170 hectares, in the comune of Porto Torres), and the Parco Nazionale dell'Arcipelago di La Maddalena, established by law n. 10 of 4 January 1994 (5,100 hectares on land and 15,046 hectares at sea).

Italy's seismic classification (ordinance OPCM 3274 of 20 March 2003) divides the country into four zones; Sardinia is classified in zone 4, the one with the lowest hazard. This is a classification for building rules, not a promise of safety and not an argument for buying.

Reaching the island

Three Sardinian airports are open to commercial civil traffic according to ENAC's traffic report for 2024: Cagliari Elmas, Olbia and Alghero Fertilia — the only Sardinian entries among the 45 Italian airports on that list. Flights between Cagliari, Alghero and Olbia and Rome Fiumicino and Milan Linate run under public-service obligations, the so-called continuità territoriale, managed by the Autonomous Region since 1 January 2010 (law 296/2006); the decree for the current regime was published in the EU Official Journal on 26 September 2025, and the new service model entered full operation on 29 March 2026. Fares and carriers change with each tender and are therefore not quoted here.

By sea, eight ports are administered by the Autorità di Sistema Portuale del Mare di Sardegna: Cagliari, Olbia, Golfo Aranci, Porto Torres, Oristano, Santa Teresa Gallura, Portovesme and Arbatax (the authority's overview, retrieved August 2026). Olbia has around ten passenger berths; Porto Torres and Cagliari serve passenger and mixed ro-ro ferries; Santa Teresa Gallura is the berth for the services to Bonifacio in Corsica; Portovesme handles the ferries to the Isola di San Pietro; Arbatax is mainly a passenger port. Golfo Aranci is described by the port authority as the Sardinian port closest to the Italian mainland.

How these connections work in practice when travelling to the island, for instance for a viewing, is described in the guide Getting to Sardinia.

What the region's shape means for a property search

Building near the coast is governed by the Piano Paesaggistico Regionale (PPR), the regional landscape plan, approved in 2006 for the coastal area — the first ambito omogeneo; it does not cover the whole island — on the basis of the 2004 salvacoste law L.R. 8/2004. The protected coastal strip, the fascia costiera, has no single fixed width: it is a perimeter drawn in the PPR's own cartography. Independently of that perimeter, coastal land within 300 metres of the shoreline (150 metres on the minor islands) is unbuildable under the PPR norms, and national law (D.Lgs. 42/2004, art. 142) makes the 300-metre coastal band an area of landscape interest by law.

Whether a specific parcel lies inside the fascia costiera or another PPR layer is not a matter of impression: it can be checked on the Region's official geoportal, in the SardegnaMappe PPR webGIS, with the coastal landscape maps at a scale of 1:25,000. That is the practical consequence of the region's shape: on an island with about 1,850 km of coastline, what may be built on a parcel depends on where it lies in the PPR cartography — a check that belongs at the start of a search, not at the end.

What these rules mean step by step when viewing and buying is described in the guide Buying property in Sardinia.

Regional measures that can accompany a purchase — for instance the anti-depopulation contributions for small comuni — are covered in the guide Regional incentives in Sardinia.

The rules of the purchase itself are national and are described on the sister portal Sicily Real Estate: the guide to the buying process in Italy and the guide to notary fees and purchase costs apply unchanged in Sardinia.

Current listings from across the island can be found on the search page.

More guides