Borca di Cadore

Borca di Cadore lies in the Boite valley at 942 metres, between the Pelmo and the Antelao, and its name comes from the Latin bifurca, a fork: perhaps the junction of the roads climbing to the forcella Forada and the val Fiorentina, perhaps the shape of the valley itself where the rio Orsolina joins the Boite. If that fork can no longer be seen, it is because the landscape is not the same: the Antelao, which they call the king of the Dolomites, has been sending down landslides for centuries that have remade the valley floor. The earliest form of the name, Bevorca, appears around 1240.

The chronology of this village is a chronology of landslides. In 1737 one came down from the Antelao and destroyed the hamlet of Sala with some thirty houses, half-wrecking the church. On 21 April 1814 the mountain came down again: it wiped out the villages of Taulèn and Marceàna entirely, blocked the Boite into a temporary lake, and the blast of air blew the roofs off. According to the notary Belli, who was there, 314 people died and sixty-two were saved; sixteen families died out leaving no one. Many had already left their houses and had gone back for something, or to untie the cattle. What remains is the Laudo of 1502, which fixed the boundaries of the Regole, and the organ Gaetano Callido built in 1791 for the parish church, still used for concerts.