The new township of Palmas was inaugurated on October 16, 1962, by Sardinian Regional President Efisio Corrias with San Giovanni Suergiu Mayor Giovanni Madeddu. The new village replaced the old Palmas, whose condition had been irreparably compromised by the infiltration of the Monte Pranu lake, inaugurated just ten years earlier (June 24, 1951) by Minister of Agriculture Antonio Segni.
The new village was built with funds from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno and the Region of Sardinia; plans were drawn up by Eng. Salaris for housing and engineer Piludu for public buildings. The project respected all the urban and architectural canons of the rationalist style, which also characterized the nearby city of Carbonia, inaugurated by Mussolini on December 18, 1938.
The urban plan of the township is characterized by a square grid with the square in the center and around it the church, municipal offices and school; commercial buildings are located along the driveway to the village. The dwellings in the new township respond to the canons and functions of a rural hamlet; the various housing types, in fact, all have a courtyard and shed for sheltering livestock and are differentiated by type: minimal two-room houses (type Ao); three-room (type A1); four-room (type A2) all on the ground floor. The second type B defines larger houses with four to five rooms raised floor and warehouse; type C houses with five rooms, raised floor and warehouse; topology D houses with six rooms, raised floor and warehouse. Work on the residential buildings began on August 24, 1960.
Work on the public works, roads, waterworks and sewers, began in 1961. The church and school were built later: the house of worship was inaugurated in 1966 by Monsignor Enea Selis. The design process of the school was problematic as the first design of the school building was rejected by the civil engineer, so it was revised and scaled down from the original design.
The architectural and urbanistic achievement of Palmas Nuovo is heir to that vein developed in Sardinia with the “Integral Reclamation” program, which inaugurated a sequence of new towns and rural hamlets that propped up the countryside and acted as a counterbalance to the better-known mining villages.
