Civic Museum of the Giara Horse

The Civic Museum of the Giara Horse in Genoni showcases the history and culture of the Giara horse, a unique breed native to Sardinia, through ethnographic exhibits and natural history displays.

Planning your visit

The Giara horse is a genuine curiosity: a small wild horse, standing barely 120 centimetres, living free on the Giara di Gesturi basalt plateau in central Sardinia, and thought to descend from animals brought by Phoenician or Greek traders more than two millennia ago. A few hundred survive, grazing among cork oaks and the seasonal pools called paulis that fill on the plateau in winter.

The museum at Genoni covers the horse — its origins, biology and the conservation effort around it — alongside the ethnography and natural history of the Giara itself: the traditional crafts of the surrounding villages, the local history, and the plateau's distinctive flora and fauna.

The point of visiting is that the museum makes sense of the plateau above it. Seeing the horses in the wild requires walking the Giara, ideally in early morning or evening when they come to the pools, and knowing what you are looking at improves the experience considerably.

Genoni is deep in the Sardinian interior and requires a car. Allow an hour for the museum, half a day with the plateau. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is listed below.