About this journey

Tempio Pausania station stands at the heart of Gallura, the co-capital of the province known for its distinctive grey-granite architecture. From here, the line heading toward Luras belongs to the Sassari–Tempio–Palau railway, a secondary narrow-gauge route across northern Sardinia managed by the regional public company ARST.

The railway is built to the 950 mm gauge historically applied across Sardinia's secondary network — a measure that was defined from rail-centre to rail-centre rather than the internationally standard inside-edge method, giving rise to the designation Italian metre gauge. These narrow-gauge lines were constructed to reach the interior towns that Sardinia's standard-gauge main network, serving the island's principal cities and ports, did not connect. By 1997 a great part of the line had already been repurposed for tourist use, and on 1 February 2015 the last remaining section still carrying regular public transport was withdrawn, leaving the entire route to operate exclusively as the Trenino Verde tourist service. The journey from Tempio Pausania to Luras runs within that preserved corridor, where the mass of Monte Limbara — rising to 1,359 metres some 16 kilometres south of the starting station — forms the dominant feature of the surrounding landscape, a reminder that this railway was built to serve a rugged granite interior that standard rail never reached.