If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR240.91), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
It doesn’t get much more isolato than Le Dune Piscinas, cast out on otherworldly golden shores in the island’s southwest. This is Sardinia unplugged, an isolated lo-fi idyll where an abandoned wagon rail, once used for transporting lead, silver and zinc from the Ingurtosu mines, now terminates at the hotel spa; and hikes over billowing ochre dunes reveal ancient juniper and olive trees, gnarled and stooped by centuries of mistral winds. Pop in your earpods for starlit movie nights in the courtyard, or relish an intimate beachfront dinner accompanied by blazing cinematic sunsets and tantalising glimpses of wild Sardinian deer silhouetted against those ever-shifting sands.
Smith Extra
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A welcome drink each and some Sardinian treats in your room
11am. Check-in is at 3pm. A luggage store and shower room are available for the use of guests arriving early or departing late.
Prices
Double rooms from £226.77 (€265), including tax at 10 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of €5.00 per person per night on check-in.
More details
Rates include an international buffet breakfast served overlooking the beach at Il Ginepro.
Also
There are some ground-floor rooms with walk-in showers and lowered sinks and toilets. But the surrounding dunes mean that the locale’s not ideal for wheelchair users.
Hotel closed
The hotel closes during low season, between November and February.
At the hotel
Free WiFi throughout, gym. In rooms: air-conditioning, LCD TV, and minibar.
Our favourite rooms
Rooms and suites are designed to reflect the landscape and nod to the region’s mining past, so expect sandblasted Orosei marble floors, original wooden beams, wrought-iron bed frames, handmade Sardinian fabrics, and unique art pieces from the owner’s private collection. The Junior Suite with Pool gets our vote for its idyllic marriage of indoor and outdoor, with patio doors that open directly onto the dunes, and a private fenced garden with pool, sunloungers, sea views, and a screen of desert foliage. There may be no better spot on the whole resort for spying Sardinian deer at sunset and sipping negronis beneath the stars.
Poolside
The outdoor pool’s sheltered location makes it an enticing option on even the windiest days. There are immersed water treadmills for those who don’t find swimming alone enough of a workout. Open daily, 10am–7pm.
Spa
Restored floorboards follow a former wagon rail to the spa, where both sauna and treatment rooms overlook the dunes, and the small courtyard relaxation area features a tranquil waterfall for maximum Zen. Private spa treatments can also be taken among the dunes themselves, on request.
Packing tips
Bring flat shoes – as rugged as your ambitions demand – for exploring the varied terrain of the dunes and a rotation of sunglasses to combat the glare. Le Dune Piscinas lends itself well to slow analogue pursuits (even the TVs are concealed behind mirrors in rooms); the library has you covered for books about Sardinia (and by Sardinian authors), but a couple of travel-size board games won’t go amiss.
Also
The hotel’s private sandy beach is accessed by a wooden walkway and is kitted out with precisely 28 parasols with twin sunloungers – a set for each room and suite at the hotel.
Pet‐friendly
The Piscinas beach is dog-friendly and four-legged friends are welcome at the hotel on request, with a nightly fee of €30 for each pet and a limit of one pooch in each room. See more pet-friendly hotels in Sardinia.
Children
The endless miles of sea and sand may be all the entertainment most kids need here, but the free WiFi is handy for teens. A number of different rooms and suites can be connected, but facilities are generally not designed with little Smiths in mind.
Sustainability efforts
Le Dune Piscinas’ transformation from 19th-century mineral store to 21st-century beachfront bolthole has been a sensitive one, retaining and restoring original features such as exposed stone walls, wooden beams and stone floors wherever possible. The hotel uses LED lighting throughout and has eradicated the use of single-use plastics.
Seafront seating at Il Maestrale for the win, where only the distant bark of red deer might break the spell cast by those gently lapping waves and superlative Sardinian sunsets.
Dress Code
Le Dune Piscinas doesn’t do dressy, but you might want to consider extra layers for alfresco dining on those breezier evenings.
Hotel restaurant
A seaview restaurant with stone arches, beamed ceilings, elegant chiavari chairs, and large windows overlooking the beach, Il Ginepro – cool and minimalist in looks – is the main restaurant for breakfast and lunch, and serves dinner, too, when you book half-board. A fresco-style series of artworks by Medhat Shafik hangs proudly over the dining room, referencing the region’s rich mining heritage. The restaurant's Mediterranean cuisine is informed by local, seasonal ingredients – yet quality still trumps terroir, as chef's inspiration demands. Open for dinner only, Rosso Tramonto’s terracotta-pink interiors set the scene for sensational sunsets and show-cooking sessions; there’s a convivial 10-seater chef’s table inside and terrace seating overlooking the dunes. By day a beach bar serving sandwiches and small plates, Il Maestrale transforms come evening, taking diners even closer to the action: this intimate seafront dining experience with ringside seats for sunset is reserved for just three tables.
Hotel bar
Set in the former mining warehouse, I Gechi American Bar is all exposed stone and wooden beams, and features a grand original fireplace and an extraordinary long-forgotten flagstone floor that has been unearthed and carefully restored. Huge arched windows flood this beach-facing space with light, illuminating 21st-century brushstrokes that include handcrafted Mariantonia Urru fabrics, and a pair of fireplace-flanking canvases by celebrated Italian painter Gianfranco Guerzoni. A modest menu of tapas, sandwiches and salads accompanies a consummate drinks list that'll take you from aperitivi through to nightcaps. Open from 12.30pm until midnight.
Last orders
At Il Ginepro, breakfast is served from 8am until 10am; lunch from 12.30pm until 3pm, and for half-board guests, dinner is 7pm until 10pm. Dinner hours at Rosso Tramonto are 6.30pm until 10.30pm.
Room service
Available during normal bar/restaurant hours, between 8am and midnight daily.
Le Dune Piscinas sits in silent solitude at the end of a long dirt track on Sardinia’s Costa Verde, its low-slung villas framed by towering golden sand dunes, forest-green foliage, and azure Mediterranean waters.
Planes
Cagliari Elmas Airport is around an hour from the hotel. Private transfers can be arranged on request.
Automobiles
Public transport is all but non-existent in the Arbus region of rural south-west Sardinia, so a car is essential if you want to get out and explore the Costa Verde and beyond. The drive to the hotel is worth the entry price alone, with the last 10-or-so kilometres comprising of a rough track that weaves down the mountain towards the sea, past the ghostly abandoned mining village of Ingurtosu, with widescreen views of the undulating Piscinas desert landscapes along the way. There’s free parking 200 metres from the resort entrance.
Other
Contact the hotel for more information if you fancy arriving, Bond-style, by boat, before sashaying up the beach to that first waiting martini.
Worth getting out of bed for
It’s easy to see why this rural region of Sardinia has been dubbed Europe’s ‘little Sahara’, with those surreal sci-fi sandscapes that might have been lifted straight from a Dalí painting, or from the blockbuster Dune movie series. No melting clocks or giant flesh-eating sandworms here though (we think). Instead, gentle Sardinian deer surf sculpted sands, turtle hatchlings pepper the beach in summer, and ancient flora – mistral-ravaged junipers, sea lilies and sand poppies – add colour and texture to the whites, golds and ochres of this mystical environment.
Spice up your Sardinia experience with horseback rides through the rolling dunes, or go full Mad Max on quad biking excursions – both can be organised through the hotel. There are also soul-nourishing beach yoga sessions at dawn and dusk, wine-tasting day trips to Costa Verde vineyards, and movie nights beneath the stars in the hotel's small courtyard.
Take a guided diving trip into the clear waters off Piscinas beach, where aquatic flora and fauna thrives on and around an 18th-century English shipwreck, complete with cannon. Or visit the long-forgotten village of Ingurtosu, an evocative (if somewhat spooky) relic of the region’s mining heritage, full of abandoned miners’ cottages, plus a church and hospital.
Local restaurants
There’s enough variety to sustain multiple repeat visits to the hotel’s restaurants. However, determined foragers will find a handful of rustic roadside trattorias and pizza joints back up on the main road, beyond Ingurtosu.
Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this out-in-the-wilds retreat in Sardinia’s south-west and shaken the sand from their slides, a full account of their back-to-nature beach break will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside Le Dune Piscinas in Sardinia…
The sands of time run oh-so-slowly at Le Dune Piscinas, where wild, rugged dunescapes and huge starlit skies provide quite the antidote to the chaos of city life. Guests who stay here tend to really stay here, mesmerised by the undulating dunes, stellar snorkelling, fine restaurants, and vast library of books about Sardinia and/or by Sardinian authors. The hotel itself, a former mining store, is just as hypnotic, with many evocative features: the wagon rail that once connected the mines at Ingurtosu is now an arched stone tunnel that links reception, bar and spa; flickering sconces in the tunnel nod to 19th-century miners’ lamps, and the bar’s flagstone floor is an original, unearthed during renovations. The dim and distant past, however, is only half the story: contemporary art graces almost every available surface; mod-Med cuisine is the focal point for dining, plus there are alfresco cinema nights, and suites with private pools – bringing bang-up-to-date comforts to blissfully idle island time.
