Costa Smeralda versus the real Gallura.

The short answer

Two nights on the Costa Smeralda, five in the rest of the Gallura. The Costa is worth seeing and worth using: the service is genuinely the best on the island, the marina at Porto Cervo is a real spectacle in August, and a handful of the hotels are excellent. It is not worth a whole week, because the thing you came to Sardinia for is twenty minutes up the road and costs a third as much.

What the Costa Smeralda actually is

Fifty five kilometers of coast between Porto Cervo and Porto Rotondo, bought and built from 1962 by a consortium under the Aga Khan, with a strict architectural code that is why it looks the way it does. It is a designed resort, not a town that grew. Nothing on it is older than my parents. That is not a criticism, it is the reason the service level exists at all, but it explains why a village atmosphere is the one thing money cannot buy you there.

What it is genuinely good at

• Hotel service at a standard nowhere else on the island matches
• Boats. The best charter fleet and the shortest run to La Maddalena
• August evenings, if you want to be where the crowd is rather than away from it
• Certainty. Air conditioning that works, staff who speak four languages, a spa that is open

What it costs, honestly

In late July and August the good rooms run from roughly 900 to well over 3,000 euro a night, a beach club day bed is 150 to 400, a bottle of water at a marina table is 8, and dinner for two with wine at the places worth eating at lands between 250 and 500. Off peak, late May or late September, the same rooms fall by half or more. The number that matters is not the room rate, it is the compounding: everything inside the perimeter is priced for the perimeter.

If you want the Costa without the tariff, sleep outside it and go in. Dinner at Porto Cervo and a night in San Pantaleo is a better evening than both halves separately.

Where it falls short

There is no Sardinian daily life inside it. Most of the staff are seasonal and from elsewhere, most of the restaurants cook an international menu with Sardinian nouns on it, and in August the famous beaches have a parking queue by nine. If you asked me to show you why I live here, I could not do it from a Porto Cervo sun bed.

The rest of the Gallura

Drive fifteen minutes and the granite, the cork oaks and the same turquoise water carry on without the gate. San Pantaleo is a real village with a Thursday market and a rock wall behind it. Santa Teresa and the far north look across at Corsica. Palau is where the working boats leave from. Inland, the vermentino vineyards around Berchidda and Monti pour better wine than most of the coastal lists and charge a tenth. The coves between Capo Testa and Vignola Mare take a walk to reach, which is precisely why they stay empty.

• A good stone farmhouse or small hotel: roughly 250 to 600 a night in high season
• Dinner for two with a bottle of vermentino: 70 to 120
• A shepherd's lunch inland, several courses and no menu: about 45 a head
• Beaches that need a fifteen minute walk and are therefore yours

How I split a week between them

Five nights in the northern Gallura, San Pantaleo or the Santa Teresa side, with a full private boat day into La Maddalena and one inland day for wine and a long lunch. Then two nights on the Costa Smeralda at the end, when you have earned the spa and the service and a marina dinner reads as a night out rather than as the whole trip. Reversed, most people find the Costa flattens everything that comes after it.

Who should ignore all of this

If what you want is a faultless hotel, a boat at the dock and no decisions for a week, stay on the Costa Smeralda for the whole time and let me book it well. That is a legitimate holiday and I will not talk you out of it. But if you told me you already know Amalfi and Capri and want something they cannot give you, then the point of coming here is the twenty minutes up the road.