There are resorts that claim to be the best family resort in Europe. Forte Village actually is. The property has been winning World Travel Awards for family excellence for so long that the judges might as well retire the category. Fifty hectares of white-sand coastline near Pula contain eight hotels of varying star ratings, thirteen private-pool villas, 21 restaurants and bars, a Real Madrid Football Academy, the Wonderland children’s kingdom, a Thalasso spa, a tennis academy, an aquapark and a water sports centre. The genius of the concept is that it doesn’t make everyone do everything together. Children aged 2 to 12 disappear into the Mini Club (free of charge). Teenagers have their own programme. Grandparents head to the Acquaforte Thalasso spa. Parents lie by the pool and hear actual silence.

Jacques Couelle designed the Cala di Volpe as if it had always been there – as if a Sardinian fishing village had grown, over centuries, into exactly this shape of whitewashed arches, stepped terraces and shaded loggias. The result is a hotel that feels simultaneously ancient and extremely current, in the way that only genuinely good architecture can. The setting – a private cove of the Costa Smeralda with superyachts moored at anchor in the bay – does the rest. This is not a resort you choose for its sports programme. You choose it for the experience of being in a specific place that exists nowhere else on earth.

The practical offer is strong nonetheless. A private beach with full service, tennis courts, a fitness and health centre, water sports from the jetty, and the Pevero Golf Club – one of the most scenic courses in Sardinia – a ten-minute drive away. The gastronomic offer has been significantly elevated in recent years. But the Cala di Volpe remains, at its core, a couples’ hotel and a place where people come to sit on a terrace, look at the sea and understand why the Aga Khan chose this particular cove.

The Valle dell’Erica sits at the northernmost point of Sardinia, looking across the Straits of Bonifacio to Corsica. The Delphina Hotels group – Sardinia’s most thoughtful luxury operator in terms of environmental stewardship and regional authenticity – runs the property as a Green Resort, powered substantially by renewables, with a food and beverage programme built around Sardinian producers. The thalasso centre draws seawater from the Strait and uses it across a full range of Thalassotherapy treatments that are among the most medically sophisticated available in any Italian resort. The children’s and family programme is extensive without dominating the property.

Is Morus is the hotel that Sardinia’s most discerning regular visitors tend to choose when asked where they actually stay when they’re not showing off. It is a Relais and Châteaux property with 70 rooms – small by the scale of many competitors on this list – with a private beach, a genuinely good restaurant, an elegant spa. The scale creates an intimacy that larger resorts cannot manufacture. The staff-to-guest ratio is high. The mood is one of considered quiet rather than managed entertainment.

Chia is where southern Sardinia gets genuinely wild. The landscape around Chia – a system of dunes, a flamingo lagoon, juniper scrubland and some of the most dramatically beautiful coastline on the island – is protected by a nature reserve, and the Chia Laguna Resort has been built in sensitive adjacency to it rather than on top of it. The result is a resort where the view from the breakfast terrace includes flamingos if the light is right, where the dunes are a ten-minute walk from the pool, and where the water sports on offer match the quality of the conditions: consistent wind for windsurfers, clear water for divers, waves for body-boarders.

The Capo d’Orso is, in the clearest possible sense, a hotel for people who want the best of the Costa Smeralda without the crowd of Porto Cervo. It is twenty minutes from the most famous address on the island and feels, in high season, completely different – quieter, more personal, with a guest profile that leans toward couples, professionals on a genuine break and anyone who finds the social theatre of Porto Cervo slightly exhausting. The thalasso spa is the operational centrepiece, the private beach is exceptional, and the water in the cove below the hotel is the same translucent blue as everywhere else on this coastline. The Maddalena Archipelago – one of the most beautiful areas of open water in the Mediterranean – is accessible by boat from Palau, ten minutes away.