Qualla: Bocchoris (city)

Bocchoris (city): Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0. In flat farmland near Port de Pollença, a long line of ancient wall still runs through the fields, and its gateways still stand open to the air. This is nearly all that visitors can see of Bocchoris, one of the oldest cities on Mallorca — a settlement whose roots reach back to around 1400 BC. The ground around it has never been excavated, so most of Bocchoris remains exactly where it has always been: underground, waiting. Yet for a place so thoroughly forgotten, it once held a remarkable distinction. Rome, the greatest power of the ancient world, treated this small Balearic town not as a conquest but as a formal ally.

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Image: Olaf Tausch | CC BY 3.0

Bocchoris (city): A Wall in a Farmer's Field

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0. Bocchoris lay near the modern town of Port de Pollença, on a hill just off the road that runs up to Pollença, in the area of the Boquer Valley. What survives above ground is spare but striking: a long stretch of the old town wall and its entrance gates, still standing in what is ...

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Image: Olaf Tausch | CC BY 3.0

Bocchoris (city): Rome's Balearic Ally

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ypsilon from Finland, CC0. Bocchoris earns its place in history through a rare legal status. Among all the towns of Mallorca, it alone is documented as a civitas foederata — a federated city, formally allied to Rome rather than simply ruled by it. Pliny the Elder recorded the arrangement in his Naturalis H...

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Image: Ypsilon from Finland | CC0

Bocchoris (city): Names Cast in Bronze

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bonaventura Serra Ferragut, Public domain. The proof of that alliance came out of the ground in the form of bronze tablets. Two such tabulae patronatus — patronage inscriptions — record Bocchoris formally choosing powerful Romans as its protectors. The first, found in the Bay of Pollença in 1951 and dated to 10 BC, names ...

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Image: Bonaventura Serra Ferragut | Public domain

Bocchoris (city): Bocchor, Boquer, and a Poet's Egypt

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malopez 21, CC BY-SA 4.0. Even the city's name is uncertain. Scholars cannot agree whether it was truly Bocchor, Bocchoris, or Bocchorum, and its origins are lost. What is certain is that the name never entirely died: it survives, worn down by centuries, in the Catalan word Boquer, which still labels the ...

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Image: Malopez 21 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bocchoris (city): Pliny's Islands

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aeroceanaute, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bocchoris comes down to us largely through a single ancient paragraph, and it is worth reading in full. In listing the Balearics, Pliny the Elder recorded that the Greeks had called them the Gymnasiae, and that the larger island — Mallorca — measured a hundred miles in length and...

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Image: Aeroceanaute | CC BY-SA 4.0