"I've seen the baker's daughter go out several nights at Casa Miquel." "Don't you know that the neighbor, Georgina, has had twins?" "Dolors always goes to mass now... I think it's more because of the new priest than because of her devotion." "Where does Maria get the money? She wears very nice clothes for a widow." These and many other gossips must have circulated in the laundries of Sant Antoni de Montbrió del Camp. Laundry was used, as long as there weren't clothes hanging out to dry. It wasn't all banal conversations. It was also a film forum, a reading club... Jokes, songs, folk remedies... and, of course, important secrets were shared. It was a space of freedom for women.
I went down to the Sant Antoni washhouses. I say lowered Because they are a few meters below the street: the mine entrance—which supplied the wash houses—was located at a lower elevation. However, the water currently comes from the public network.
Located in the town of Montbrió del Camp, these magnificent wash houses were on the verge of demolition in the 21st century, but public pressure saved them. They have been thoroughly renovated.
They were built in the last quarter of the 18th century, and renovated in the 1930s. The benches, where women left their bodies, baskets, and ferratas (as they call them here), as well as the covers, which provide shelter and shade for much of the space, but not for the two rafts, which are left exposed to the elements, date from this period. The large raft was for washing clothes, and the small raft, closest to the stream of water that fills it, was for rinsing; I mean was, but I actually have to say is, because they're still used. But not much. Nothing like the huge influx they received long ago, from Monday to Sunday: yes, the women who worked in the textile industry all week came to wash clothes on Sunday. The book explains this in detail.The Washers of Montbrió del Camp. Heritage and a space of female and collective memory., which includes numerous oral witnesses from women who went to wash.
"When I was little, my mother and the women from the nearby streets would come here to wash clothes. I used to come here a little more "granadita" and "go over" the small items, like napkins, socks... – she had removed the big stains and I didn't wash the small ones at home – and I would separate them. In the washing machine, the larger items would continue to be washed at the laundromats," recalls Carmina Blay, mayor of Montbrió del Camp and also councilor for Patrimoni, today's host.
Carmina tells me that long ago there were other washhouses: those on Calle de Avall and those "for the sick," where clothes had to be washed by those suffering from an infectious disease. They also had to be used when an epidemic spread through the town, to prevent it from spreading further. The small, public washhouse for the sick became part of the grounds of what is now the Hotel Termes Montbrió.
"Before, a lot of dirty clothes would accumulate in the houses: families used to be larger, and a lot of underwear would get dirty (there were no sanitary pads or diapers...)," explains Anna Maria García, who used to come here to wash. She particularly remembers the pain in her back and knees, and her chapped and chapped hands in the winter. "The rubber gloves hadn't arrived yet," she says as a wind carries a handful of leaves toward the large pond, where they land. The wind pushes them toward where we are, and the gesture of removing them—some me, others Anna Maria—is inevitable.
An additional attraction of the Sant Antoni wash houses are the permanent artistic interventions they host, which contribute to making Catalonia's diverse freshwater heritage a must-see attraction.
And the men, where were they?
Men didn't frequent the washhouses much, if at all. They stood in the dirt, dirtying their clothes, which the women then "had to wash." Only a few men or older sons came to help their wives or mothers carry the coffin full of wet clothes home, which weighed as much as a dead donkey. However, some women hung their clothes on clotheslines or over bushes, where they would drain and dry a little. That way, they wouldn't be so heavy when they returned.
"I remember seeing two men washing clothes in the Sant Antoni laundries, around the year 2000. One had a sick wife, and of course, there was no other choice, and the other had lived alone in Africa and was used to doing laundry," explains Anna Maria Garcia.
The task of doing laundry for others was common during the Civil War. Soldiers quartered in Parc Samà would go to Montbrió to find a woman who could wash their clothes. Payment was made in food. Sometimes they paid with white bread, a luxury at the time.