This Tiny Sardinian Village Might Be a New 'Blue Zone'—and Could Hold the Secrets to Female Longevity

In Bolotana, a town on the Italian island with about 2,300 residents, women who reach the age of 70 are about three times as likely to live to 100 than women in the United States, according to a new study

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

October 13, 2026 11:00 a.m.

A small village in the mountains of Sardinia may hold the secrets to female longevity.

In Bolotana, a town on the Italian island with about 2,300 residents, women who reach the age of 70 are about three times as likely to live to 100 than women in the United States, researchers report in a study published October 4 in the journal Frontiers in Aging.

The findings suggest Bolotana might be a previously unidentified “blue zone,” a place where people live exceptionally long lives. If confirmed, it would join destinations including another region of Sardinia; Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; and Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula as one of the world’s recognized longevity hotspots.

The study’s co-authors first learned of Bolotana because they heard about its abundance of centenarians, or people who live to be at least 100 years old.

Intrigued, the researchers decided to dig into the data. Using the town’s extensive historic records, which date back more than a century, they were able to independently verify the ages of Bolotana’s identified centenarians, living or dead. Of the 3,060 individuals born in Bolotana between 1900 and 1925, they confirmed that 38 lived to be at least 100.

Around the world, women tend to live longer than men. But the team’s analysis revealed that Bolotana’s female residents were exceptionally long-lived. In Bolotana, women who reach age 70 have a 13.83 percent chance of surviving to 100 years old, compared to just 4.92 percent for men. (That’s different from Sardinia’s original blue zone, which is known for male longevity.) For comparison, 70-year-old women across Italy have only a 3.5 percent chance of making it to 100, and in the U.S., that chance is 3.6 percent.

Once the women of Bolotana reach the age of 70, they have nearly 21 years of life remaining, based on the researchers’ estimates. The village appears to have one of the longest-lived female populations in the world, second only to Hong Kong.

The study doesn’t explain why Bolotana’s residents, particularly its women, lead such long lives—but the researchers have a few ideas. Community members eat little meat, and their largely plant-based diets consist primarily of foods they grow or make themselves, including wheat grown in their fields and cheese made from their sheep’s milk. They drink modest amounts of wine and consume a variety of olive oils.

Bolotana doesn’t have a gym, and its residents don’t exercise intentionally—but they do walk pretty much everywhere, including up and down the village’s steep, hilly streets. Additionally, Bolotana’s residents live in multi-generational households, and many men stay home and share in the household responsibilities.

Lead study author Giovanni Mario Pes, a longevity researcher at the University of Sassari in Italy, tells the Guardian’s Angela Giuffrida that Bolotana’s residents maintain “very intense and very real social relations” throughout their lives.

He pointed to Giovanna Marras, a 101-year-old woman who lives with her sister. “They live together, they cook together, they talk to each other easily,” Pes tells the Guardian. “There was absolutely no sign of cognitive decline.”

The team also suspects genetics might play a role, but they say they need to conduct more research to test that hypothesis.

However, they worry they will soon run out of time. If “cars, iPhones and American junk food” eventually reach the village, “you’ll see type 2 diabetes skyrocket, cardiovascular disease go up, dementia go up, many types of cancer go up, and the longevity phenomena will be gone,” study co-author Dan Buettner, a longevity researcher who founded the company Blue Zones and coined the term, tells National Geographic’s Jessica Roy. “I give it a generation. But … before that happens, we have a generation to bring our archaeological tools and uncover what they’ve been doing.”

Their research could have implications far beyond Bolotana, offering insights into the practices and values that might contribute to improving longevity across the globe.

“We now know something extraordinary is happening in Bolotana,” Buettner says in a statement. “The next step is to understand why and whether the lessons can help people elsewhere live longer, healthier lives.”

Some outside researchers have questioned the validity of the entire blue zones concept, pointing to unreliable birth records, potential age misreporting, methodological shortcomings and the team’s commercial interests.

However, Pes says the new research provides strong evidence that Bolotana’s residents have lived to unusually advanced ages.

“It is not just the level of longevity in Bolotana that is remarkable, but the degree to which it can be reconstructed from independent historical sources,” he says in the statement. “When civil records, parish archives and family lineages all converge on the same individuals across more than a century, it allows us to rigorously test longevity patterns in a way that is rarely possible in demography.”