Alghero

Alghero still answers to its Catalan name, l'Alguer — the language survives on bilingual street signs and in the dialect of older fishermen, a legacy of the Aragonese who repopulated the town in the fourteenth century. Inside the sea-walls, cobbled lanes of tufa open onto a harbour known for its red coral and, above all, its spiny lobster. The signature dish is aragosta alla catalana, the local lobster dressed simply with raw tomato and onion — a plate that reads as both Sardinian and Iberian. Restaurants here lean to the sea and to that Catalan inflection, though the surrounding Riviera del Corallo and the Nurra plain also send up sheep's cheese, snails and robust reds.