Commonly known as Monte Granatico, this property is now owned by the municipality but once belonged to the parish.
Documents report 1685 as the year when the first Monte Granatico was built in Simala and the foundations may date from that period.
This was the time when the bishops of the diocese of Usellus-Ales-Terralba began to establish the Monti Granatici institutions to help local people, guaranteeing needy farmers loans of wheat and barley at very low interest rates that were repaid when the harvested grain was stored. From 1780, the Monti Granaticiinstitutions were supplemented with the Monti Nummari, which lent money to buy oxen and work implements. Management was assigned to the parish priest in each village, aided by an official and a so-called 'custodian'. These individuals held a strongbox with a three-key lock that they could only open in the presence of three administrators.
The Monti Granatici institutions spread from our diocese to the whole of Sardinia. They carried out their laudable work from the end of the seventeenth century until their slow decline began in the nineteenth century.
This establishment continued to operate in Simala until a few years after the Second World War. Thereafter, it was no longer used for its original purpose and, without maintenance, it fell into disrepair. In the nineteen eighties, along with the adjacent Oratory of the Santissimo Rosario, it was sold by the diocesan curia to the Municipality, which ordered its complete restoration.
