Funerary Tradition in the Prehistory of Sardinia – The domus de janas

Sardinian folklore calls them fairy houses; archaeology knows the domus de janas as chambers cut into rock by prehistoric communities from the 5th to the 3rd millennium BC. Carved doorways, red-ochre symbols and sculpted bull horns turn these tombs into portraits of the houses and beliefs of the living, and roughly 3,500 such hypogea are scattered across the island. UNESCO inscribed a representative series of necropolises in 2025, the western Mediterranean's richest rock-cut burial tradition made World Heritage.