The term or toponym "dispensa," which is so frequently found when browsing the island's geographical and topographical maps, indicates the site where the masonry building, the center of forestry activity and an obligatory stop for mule or horse transport, once stood – and in some cases, its ruins can still be identified. Here, vegetable charcoal was concentrated before leaving the forest on ox-drawn carts or, in some cases, on small railway convoys.
The proper name that sometimes accompanies the noun instead indicates the name of the forestry industrialists who carried out the forest utilizations. The internal activity of the companies was simple but functional. Each company consisted of a certain number of charcoal burner crews (with 2-6 workers) who depended directly on the entrepreneur. There was the "machine boss," who directed the work, the "imposed boss" who supervised the charcoal stockpiling and accounting, and the "dispenser" who provided for provisions and the larder. The ruins of the old larders, buildings where wood and charcoal were concentrated before transport to the sales locations, are the testimony of the intense logging activity that took place in the forests of Sardinia between the end of the last century and the first decades of the 1900s.
