For years, the listing for El Pati farmhouse in Borredà opened by saying the house dated from "the year 1600". Nobody in the family could remember where that figure had come from. It is in no deed, it is not in the Land Registry and it appears in no heritage inventory. It was one of those things you say because they have always been said.
We don't say it any more. The house was built in 1768, and the proof was two metres from the door every guest walks through.
Two dates on the same beam
Above the front door there is a wooden beam with two numbers carved into it, separated by a gap. The one on the right, 1976, was always known: it is the year my parents rebuilt the house, which had been a ruin for decades. I had assumed the other number was part of the same inscription.
Going back over a photograph of the façade at full resolution and enlarging the lintel, the number on the left reads unmistakably: 1768.
The question that had to be answered
A date carved into a beam means nothing if the beam arrived later. It could have been reclaimed timber, brought from another house during the rebuild, in which case 1768 would say nothing about El Pati.
I asked my mother, who was there for the 1976 works. Her answer was that this beam was precisely one of the things the ruin already had when they started to rebuild. It is not imported timber: it is the building's own wood. And whoever rebuilt in 1976 carved their year beside the original, not over it.
It is the only direct dating evidence that exists for this house. The Land Registry goes back no further, because the property was first registered in 1981, and the farmhouse does not appear in the Architectural Heritage Inventory of Catalonia.
And 1768 fits everything else
The interesting part came afterwards. El Pati stands inside the Capdevila estate, documented from the 16th century as a holding of the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll. The heritage inventory record states that by the 18th century the Capdevila family were wholesale wool merchants, and that this was when they enlarged their own farmhouse on the north side. Near the great house stands their family chapel, dedicated to Sant Jaume.
In other words: the 18th century is the great house's economic peak, and it is the century in which the great house is enlarged and El Pati is built. The date on the beam is not an isolated fact. It falls exactly where the documents say there was money to build.
What the family tells
Why El Pati was built is in no document. The family tells it, and it has reached us by word of mouth: the master of Capdevila had a farmhand he thought highly of, and a daughter; the two married, and the master built them a house down below, in the courtyard of the estate. Hence the name — pati is Catalan for courtyard — which has never been lost.
With the house dated to 1768, that story stops being "something that happened a long time ago" and becomes oral tradition passed down over six or seven generations, confirmed by a date carved above the door.
I have gathered all of it — the lintel, the registry data, the inventory record and the recordings of my mother, Conxita Gomis Bartomeus — on a separate page, with every source cited.
Read the history of El Pati farmhouse, from 1768 to today
And if you'd like to sleep inside it, the house is still standing and still in the family: El Pati farmhouse for rent in Borredà.
