Once upon a time they were traveled every day by miners and sorters, men and women heading to the mine or to the laundries for a day's work. With the end of the mining era, vegetation and oblivion had erased the paths: now the volunteers of the Normann Village association have rediscovered them and, with the authorization of Forestas, the go-ahead from the Municipalities of Gonnesa and Iglesias and the supervision of the Italian Alpine Club, are about to launch them in the Res, the Sardinian hiking network.
The job
Fifty kilometers of mining trails have been cleared, arranged and reopened by volunteers: eight trails and seven variants that revolve around the Normann village and head towards Monteponi, Monte Agruxiau, Bindua, Gonnesa, Villaggio Asproni, Seddas Modditzis, Monte Scorra, Nebida, all to be covered on foot to rediscover places of memory full of history and mining archeology, geology, speleology, biology. "To trace these paths, we went back to nineteenth-century maps of the area, we didn't invent anything new - says Pierluigi Carta, president of the Normann Village association, at the forefront of the rediscovery of the paths - we had to clean them of vegetation and arrange them to make them passable again. To do this we asked the authorization of Forestas, which manages the cadastre of the paths, we have pre-registered them and they will be included in the Sardinian hiking network. There is a technical table between Forestas and Cai, the paths are traced according to the standards of the Italian Alpine Club and we are also following the same criteria when installing signage». The group of volunteers, including residents of Normann but also a cartographer, photographers and artists, have worked hard to reopen the old trails. These days they are arranging the signs that identify each of them and indicate the direction to follow. There are one hundred and five signs, purchased by the association thanks to the "Guardians of the Future" project financed by the Sardinia Foundation, the Geomining Park and the Municipality of Gonnesa to enhance the mining village, a Gonnesina hamlet. "There is a cultural heritage that we do not know how to read - says Carta - the rediscovery of these paths, making them usable again for excursions, is an awareness of the great heritage that we have and that we can promote from a naturalistic point of view, as well how historic."
