Bortigali

A tradition not entirely documented has it that the first settlement here was a Punic-Roman town called Berre, later destroyed, and that seven surviving families made the first nucleus of the village: a neighbourhood of Bortigali is still called Sette padeddas, seven pans — that is, seven hearths, seven families. The other settlement of the comune, Mulargia, takes its name from the millstones it produced from Roman times onward, and many of them can still be seen in private courtyards. The territory is full of nuraghi and domus de janas, and Bortigali sits like an amphitheatre at the foot of Monte Santu Padre, whose summit passes a thousand metres and on whose rock walls the griffon vultures of the Bosa colony come flying in. It is one of the few villages in Sardinia to have a water mill still in working order, even though nobody uses it.

With its own lords Bortigali did not get on: the Borgia heirs administered the fief from Spain through their officials, and between 1774 and 1785 the village openly refused to pay the tributes; in 1795 it took part in the anti-feudal risings. In 1821 it was made the chief town of a district that included eight other comuni, and in 1843 it finished for good with its last feudatories; in that century it had more than three thousand inhabitants and was, with Bolotana, the most populous place in the Marghine. And in 2010 the council did something few comuni do: it decided its own name. Joining the project of the Sardinian topographic atlas, it resolved that the official form in Sardinian is Bortigale, and it produced its evidence — a church book written in 1600, the parish registers of the seventeen hundreds, and the local poets, who from the end of the eighteen hundreds to today have almost always headed their poems A Bortigale. The oldest form of all, Ortigali, would come from ortigu, the cork oak: a place rich in cork oaks.