How Catalonia Built Modernisme · Day 1 of 14

Cotton Money Built These Buildings

Walk along the waterfront in Barcelona, at the bottom of Via Laietana, and you pass a block of arcaded flats known as the porxos d’en Xifré. It was begun in 1836. The reliefs above the arcade show ships, tools, trade and navigation. The man who paid for it, Josep Xifré, had left a small Catalan town for Cuba as a young man and come back rich enough to be called the wealthiest man in Spain. He put his money into a rental block facing the harbour he had sailed out of.

That is the pattern, sixty years before the buildings this course is about. Money made somewhere else, brought home, and turned into a façade on a street where the neighbours would see it. What changed by the 1880s was the amount of money, the number of families holding it, and the fact that Barcelona had suddenly acquired several square kilometres of empty building land.

Start with cotton, because cotton is the engine. Catalonia had no coal worth mining and no cotton fields. What it had was fast rivers, a port, and a habit of textile work going back to hand looms and printed calico in the eighteenth century. The first steam-powered factory in Spain, called simply El Vapor, opened in Barcelona in 1832; workers burned it down three years later, which tells you how the century was going to go. Mechanised spinning and weaving spread anyway. Coal had to be shipped in from Asturias or from Wales, and it was expensive, so from the 1860s the industry did something unusual. It moved upstream.

Along the Llobregat and the Ter, manufacturers bought stretches of riverbank, built a weir and a canal, dropped the water onto a turbine and put the mill next to it. Because there was no town nearby, they built the town too. These are the colònies industrials, the industrial colonies, and the usual count runs to about seventy of them. A colony meant workers’ housing, a company shop, a school run by nuns, a church, a priest whose salary the owner paid, and rules about who could live there and who had to leave. Colònia Sedó at Esparreguera, Colònia Vidal at Puig-reig, L’Ametlla de Merola. In 1890 Eusebi Güell moved his textile works out of Sants to a stretch of land at Santa Coloma de Cervelló and founded the Colònia Güell. Water was free. Labour in a company town was cheap and quiet. The profits came back down the valley to Barcelona.

Now add the colonies of the other kind. Cuba and Puerto Rico stayed Spanish until 1898, and Catalan manufacturers spent decades lobbying to keep them as a closed market for Catalan cloth. Joan Güell, Eusebi’s father, made his first fortune in Santiago de Cuba, came back, opened a mill in Sants, and became the loudest voice in Spain for protective tariffs. That is not a coincidence; it is a business model. Catalan families also ran the trade itself — shipping, sugar, tobacco, credit — and some of them ran slaves. Antonio López y López, born in Comillas but rich out of Cuba, built the shipping line that became the Compañía Transatlántica and founded the Banco Hispano Colonial in 1876 to lend the Spanish state money for holding Cuba. In 1878 he was made Marquis of Comillas. In 2018 the city craned his statue off its plinth near the port because of his part in the slave trade.

The men who came home rich were called indianos or americanos, and you can still read their money in the houses at Begur, Sitges and Lloret de Mar. Cuban money built infrastructure too. The first railway in the Iberian peninsula, the twenty-eight kilometres from Barcelona to Mataró, opened in October 1848; its promoter, Miquel Biada, had made his money in Cuba and died before it ran.

So: mill profits, colonial trade, shipping, sugar, tobacco, banking, and then wine, because when phylloxera wrecked the French vineyards in the 1870s Catalan wine sold at prices nobody had seen. All of it piling up in one city at the same time. Barcelona called the boom of the late 1870s and early 1880s the febre d’or, the gold fever; Narcís Oller wrote a novel of that name about a man who gets rich on paper and loses it. There was a crash in 1882 and bank failures after, and the money kept coming anyway. The city had about 183,000 people in 1857. By 1900, having swallowed Sants, Gràcia, Sant Martí and the other surrounding towns in 1897, it had more than half a million.

Here is why this produced architecture rather than something else. This class had cash and no standing. Madrid had the court, the grandees, the ministries and the old land. Barcelona had factory owners whose grandfathers had been coopers or emigrants, in a city that had lost its own institutions and spoke a language the state did not recognise. There was no inherited palace to move into and no rank to inherit. Titles could be bought — López got his marquisate in 1878, Güell was made a count in 1908 — and a title is only worth having if people can see it from the street.

A building was the one form of display that was public, permanent and legible to everyone who walked past. It also paid. Land in the new grid north of the old walls was bought by exactly these families, and the standard investment was a block of flats with the owner on the main floor and tenants above. Antoni Amatller, who made chocolate, commissioned Puig i Cadafalch. Josep Batlló, textiles, bought a dull house on Passeig de Gràcia in 1903 and had Gaudí tear the front off it. The Casa Milà was built for Pere Milà and Roser Segimon, and part of what paid for it was the fortune her first husband had made growing coffee in Guatemala.

Which means the movement rests on a narrow base. The buildings were paid for by protected cotton, company towns, and a colonial market that ended in 1898 when Spain lost Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Some of that capital came home and went straight into Barcelona property and banks, which is one reason the most extravagant of these buildings go up after the empire is gone. The style’s best decade was funded, in part, by the liquidation of the thing that had funded it.