Boí

Boí appears in records as early as 1079, under the name *villa de Bogin*. The village and its castle were always among the most important in the valley, important enough that the whole valley eventually took its name from the settlement. The name itself derives from the Latin *vallis bovinum*, meaning "valley of the cattle herds." The castle stood beside what is now the parish church but was destroyed during the Albigensian wars.

For most of its history, the village was under the lordship of the barons, later counts, of Erill, until seigneurial rights were abolished in 1831. Population figures give a sense of the village's modest scale across the centuries: in 1381, twelve households were recorded, amounting to roughly sixty people. By 1842, just before the village was merged with neighbouring municipalities into what became the Vall de Boí, there were 14 houses and 54 inhabitants.

The geographer Pascual Madoz described Boí in his 1849 dictionary. He found a village of 17 stone-fronted, timber-framed houses of a single storey, on steep, unpaved, irregular streets exposed to wind from all directions, though he considered the climate healthy. The land was mountainous and hard to farm; rye, barley, potatoes and legumes were grown, and livestock included sheep, goats, oxen and twelve breeding mares.

Hunters could find bears, wolves, wild boar and chamois. A spring sat close to the village, though Madoz thought the river water better. He singled out the stone bridge over the river as a structure of notably ancient workmanship, and noted two mills still in operation, though earlier mills along the local streams had been destroyed by floods.

The old quarter of Boí is officially designated a cultural asset of national interest. The village developed from a fortified core on the left bank of the Noguera de Tor river, clustering around two prominent rocky hillocks. Surviving traces of the original fortifications include the gateway onto the church square, part of the old road to Caldes, a tower to the east of that gate, and sections of wall with loophole edges to the west of the church of Sant Joan.