The best hiking app for the Gennargentu
The Gennargentu is Sardinia's roof — Punta La Marmora reaches 1,834 m — and together with the neighbouring Supramonte and the Gola su Gorropu it forms some of the wildest, most trail-sparse mountain country in Italy. Paths are often unmarked or vague, the limestone gorges are deep, and mobile coverage in the interior is famously thin.
This is where a bring-your-own-map recorder shines: NomadTracks records your line and puts the map you trust on the screen, entirely offline.
Download NomadTracks free on the App Store
What the walking is like
Expect rough, rocky terrain: the high granite domes of the Gennargentu, the karst plateau and canyons of the Supramonte, and Gorropu, one of Europe's deepest gorges. Trails come and go, cairns are intermittent, and GPS ground-truth matters more than in the Alps — there simply isn't a dense waymarked network to fall back on.
The map that actually helps here
The maps worth carrying are the park and CAI (Club Alpino Italiano) sheets, plus any local topo you can find — and NomadTracks lets you bring all of them. Import a georeferenced GeoPDF/GeoTIFF and it aligns automatically; photograph a paper CAI sheet or a park handout and georeference it in-app with control points. Either way the map goes live and offline with your position on it, and the accuracy is shown in metres.
Offline, private, all day
Deep in the Supramonte there is no signal — and none is needed. Recording, your tracks, and every custom map work with the radio off because they're on the device. A long mountain day records on one charge with the screen off or from the Apple Watch, and everything stays on your devices and your own iCloud, with no account.
Related
- The NomadTracks hiking tracker — all the features
- Use park & area maps offline with a live GPS position
- How to georeference a paper map
- A recorded example: Dürrensee to the Drei Zinnen in the Dolomites