Excellent scenic viewpoint and example of a clustered Pallarés village that still preserves its traditional structure. Located at an altitude of 1,300 m, the village offers excellent forest hikes.
In the year 1066, the name Tornafort appears for the first time in documentation as a result of an agreement made between Count Artal I of Pallars Sobirà, who defined this castle to Count Ramon V of Pallars Jussà.
Tornafort is mentioned in several documents from the 11th century onwards. This town has always been dependent on the county house and formed part of a territory where the viscounts of Vilamur exercised jurisdiction, along with the possessions that depended on the Urgelese seat. However, the nearby center of the Malmercat family, one of the most powerful families in Pallars at the time, would have extended its domains, at various times, towards the border of the Tornafort castellany.
The Castilian name of Tornafort appears for the first time in the 13th century.
In the 16th century, specifically on February 25, 1504, the Duke of Cardona sent a letter to Carlos de Tornafort with the order that "... the fortress be well guarded ..."
In the 17th century, thanks to Onofre Timbau's description of the Marquisate of Pallars and the Viscounty of Vilamur, we know that in 1628 Tornafort was part of the Marquisate of Pallars and the Viscounty of Vilamur, which had full civil and criminal jurisdiction over its inhabitants. There are 10 houses governed by a mayor and a judge.
In 1639, the castellany is still referred to as Tornafort in a notarial document in which the governor of the Duke of Cardona, Lluís de Gomar, presented his arguments to Madalena de Copons, Lady of Malmercat, to assert the Duke's rights to the castellany within the context of the numerous disputes between the two lordships. The meeting took place in the district known as Los Pozos, within the district of Tornafort.
In the 18th century, when the castle was only a distant memory and its traces were buried beneath new buildings, the Viscounty of Vilamur was incorporated into the jurisdictional institutions of the Marquisate, which, in turn, would form part of a higher royal or state structure, first called the "sub-district of Pallars" and later the "district of Talarn."
Tornafort towards modernity (19th and 20th centuries). Around 1850, the town, like all the towns in the Soriguera municipal district and throughout Pallars, was almost at its peak population. Despite this, the crisis of the subsistence farming model (1870–1910) led to a population stagnation in the mountain areas, which was felt in the valley towns and in Tornafort itself.
This period was also marked by a series of years of adverse weather conditions, mainly in the late 19th century, and by the negative commercial effects of the arrival of phylloxera in the Tremp Basin, which would impact the mountain areas of Pallars Sobirà. This economic crisis resulted in migration, initially seasonal and later permanent, to Barcelona and the major cities.
Despite the crisis, modernization took hold, primarily in infrastructure and facilities. The gradual transformation of livestock farming structures toward cow's milk production largely underpinned the economy of towns like Tornafort. The Civil War (1936-1939) affected the town in many ways. The fact that both fronts were established and residents had to be evacuated impacted the urban fabric in several ways.
In 1979, the residents of Tornafort petitioned the town council and the Generalitat to become a Minor Municipal Entity, but the process remained unresolved. In 1999, twenty years after the town's residents had requested the establishment of a Minor Municipal Entity, the process was resumed. In July 2004, the Generalitat approved the constitution of the Tornafort Decentralized Municipal Entity.
Source: http://ow.ly/of2zG & http://ow.ly/of2AO