The valuable archive of the Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul opens the doors for the ARA Premium Club

It's cold in the storage room of the Historical Archive of the Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul, located in the same modernist complex, below the lobby, the old hub of the hospital center, where admission records were once kept and where carts carrying patients passed on their way to their respective wards: women with infectious diseases, women with non-infectious diseases... (and the same for men). The temperature inside is always low to properly preserve the invaluable documents it houses (on a series of compact discs).

A good twenty ARA subscribers, Premium Club membersBundled up, they scan the spines of the documents with wide eyes. Some are written in Latin, others in Catalan, some in Castilian Spanish... The language indicates the era of each one with considerable accuracy. "Look, documents from 1711, shortly before the loss of national liberties. All written in Catalan, of course," a subscriber points out.

The star piece of the archive is the seven volumes of the construction project for the hospital where we are now, which stopped admitting patients several years ago (it is now exclusively for tourist visits and cultural and scientific activities). These seven volumes are very well preserved inside a wooden box – “Like the box that contained the project for Barcelona as host of the 1992 Olympic Games; the ‘magic box,’ it was called,” another subscriber remarks. On the spine of each of these volumes it says (in Spanish: we are in the year 1911):Santa Cruz and San Pablo Hospital ProjectThere are four volumes dedicated to the budget!

"The Hospital of the Holy Cross, the origin of this hospital, the Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul, was founded to take in the poor, the homeless, foundlings, orphans, and children... Initially, it wasn't for healing," emphasizes Miquel Terreu, head of the archives. "The hospital's resources didn't come from the sick or their families, but from alms, donations, inheritances... Also from royal privileges: provisions with the force of law that provided indirect aid, either by avoiding expenses or opening the doors to sources of income," explains Terreu. On the ceiling of the lobby, among many other symbols, is the Cross of Saint George, which represents the "honorable citizens of Barcelona" who have supported the hospital for centuries. "All of this generated a great deal of financial documentation. That's why a large part of what's in the archives consists of documents with numbers," he adds.

"The doctors at this hospital visited the sick free of charge." This “charitable” system operated until the 1960s,” Miquel points out.

The group then enters a room with a long table covered in books, plans, and various documents belonging to the archive, but these have been deliberately separated so they can be viewed properly. A 13th-century “table book”—pre-printing, that is—stands out, as does another from the Casa de Convalecencia (Convalescent Home) containing the history of Barcelona’s hospitals, with some beautiful, more or less accurate illustrations. “Are these facsimiles?” a subscriber asks the person in charge of the archive. “No! We don’t have a budget for facsimiles,” he replies. "They're all originals."

Miquel explains that for centuries the Hospital de la Santa Creu held the exclusive rights to theatrical performances in the city of Barcelona. These performances took place in the theater that bore its name, the Teatro de la Santa Creu, located on La Rambla. "This privilege was granted by Philip II of Castile, after eight years of negotiations by the hospital," Miquel explains. "Yes, Philip II, what Spanish bureaucracy came up with!" he says with a smile. This exclusivity was lost with the opening of the Liceu, located on the same Rambla, a little further up. Once the theatrical monopoly was lost, the Teatro de la Santa Creu, wanting to maintain its prominence, changed its name to Teatro Principal.

Finally, the Premium Club members ventured through an underground tunnel to freely visit some of the pavilions of what is the largest Modernist complex in the world (an area equivalent to nine blocks of the Eixample district). This grand hospital complex—financed by Pau Gil, a Barcelona banker living in Paris who died without direct descendants and left a large part of his estate to build a new hospital for the poor, on the condition that it be named Sant Pau, and which remained unfinished—is, along with the Palau de la Música Catalana, the centerpiece of Catalan music, Montaner—continued by his son, Pere Domènech Roura—and is, quite justifiably, a World Heritage Site. Remember that if you are a subscriber and you join the Premium Club You can enjoy other benefits such as browsing Ara.cat without advertising or giving a complete digital subscription to whomever you want.