Bultei

On the arms of Bultei there is a little bronze boat with a stag's head on the prow. It is a votive boat of the Nuragic age, found in 1949 in the comune's territory, at Argiolas in the locality of Bonotta, and it is no longer here: the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari keeps it. Beside the boat, on the shield, there are two sheep, standing for the sheep-farming the village has always lived on. The rest of the old things have stayed where they were, scattered over the countryside of the Goceano: the nuraghi, the giants' tombs like Sas Presones, the nuraghe Tilariga and the dolmen called Su Coveccu. When the village was born, though, nobody knows: the first written records are of 1388, but historians put it at least two centuries earlier, and perhaps a little before the year one thousand.

Around Bultei, on the other hand, there are villages that are no longer there. Until the early nineteen-hundreds the remains of two ancient settlements could still be seen north of the built-up area, and it is believed that a terrible pestilence wiped them out towards the end of the Middle Ages. In the countryside there also stood Usolvisi, destroyed in the early Middle Ages, which had a Camaldolese convent: in the second half of the twelfth century the bishop of Castro made over to them the nearby church of San Saturnino, with a large income. That church is still there, and next to it are the hot water of the free pool of Su Anzu and the calidarium of the Roman baths of the town of Lesa. From Bultei comes Francesco Bande, one of the most important musicians in the history of Sardinian music.