Chiesa di Santa Marina (Church of St Marina)

The Church of St Marina in Villanovaforru towers over the eponymous hill, a few hundred metres from the centre of the village: it is a sanctuary for a worship that is one of a kind in Sardinia. The Spanish Holy Virgin and Martyr (who was assumedly born in Galicia, as the tradition goes) is actually only celebrated in Villanovaforru, with rituals that stand out for the keen veneration of the devotees.
A tree-lined path will gently lead you to the front of the church, which has a plain gabled façade with three small arched entryways on the main side.
The church itself is the outcome of numberless successive rebuilding works, as its quite uneven design seems to instantly suggest. Oddly enough, some evidence of the different rebuilding works can be spotted in a stone placed under the lintel, bearing the date 1686. Actually, the inscription on the stone says that the church was probably founded as early as 1280, and 1583 must be, instead, the date of the first few renovations or repurposes of the building.
As a pilgrimage destination, you can imagine the never-ending flow of wayfarers who went to that little church to pay homage to the Galician Saint. The wide loggia, dotted with three arches and built in the late 16th century, must have acted as a shelter for the devotees, who often decided not to walk on at night and to have a rest near the church.
The church was further extended in 1966, when two chapels were added on the sides of the single-nave layout so that now it looks like a Latin cross church.