We do not deny our best past

Walking through the main streets of pre-Eixample Barcelona can be unpleasant due to its safety, dirt, and neglect. We can understand that the demographic and tourist pressure to which they are exposed makes it difficult to always keep them in perfect condition. What I find incomprehensible is the obsession with hiding their best features and what they represent. Everyone will have walked past the building at the end of La Rambla, going down to the left, whose possible uses have been much discussed. References are always to "the cannon foundry." There's a plaque commemorating it for both citizens and tourists.

Was the cannon foundry really that beautiful? Was it a neoclassical building like the one you see? Did it look like a mansion? Of course not. They're hiding the fact that the building that now exists was the exhaustively historicized Bank of Barcelona, ​​which was the main private bank in the entire country, with the exception of the Bank of Spain, and for three-quarters of a century the main bank in Catalonia. Its president was another name that has vanished from the center of Barcelona: Manuel Girona. He was the richest Catalan in 19th-century Catalonia, and he paid for the building of the University of Barcelona and the Gothic façade of the cathedral. We have a magnificent biography of him and his family, written by Lluïsa Pla. The most brilliant period in the economic and business history of Catalonia—the second third of the 19th century and, in general, the entire 19th century—cannot be explained without Manuel Girona.

Nor does Manuel Girona appear in the building overlooking Plaza Medinaceli and Plaza de la Mercè, where the Civil Registry is currently located. That building was his home. It was the palace of the Marquis of Santa Coloma, who lost it due to his debt, the result of his gambling. His main creditor—Manuel Girona's father—retained the palace to collect outstanding debts. The Geronas built the current building. The only thing that can be read in the corner of the building's facade, at the corner of Ample Street and Medinaceli Square, is that it had belonged to the Marquis of Santa Coloma. No one remains silent about who built the current building.

Going a little further, to Plaça de la Mercè, in a building that had been the Elisava School and had previously been the Official Chamber of Industry of Barcelona for decades, there is now the so-called Palau Martorell. Martorell was the architect who built the palace. But who commissioned the palace? It is not mentioned anywhere what was clearly written in a discreet bas-relief high on the façade until the last restoration: that it was the headquarters of the Sociedad de Crédito Mercantil, the company that commissioned its construction at the end of the 19th century. It was in the orbit of the Marquis of Comillas. The Sociedad de Crédito Mercantil had been founded in 1863 to participate in the promotion and construction of railways. The building was briefly the headquarters of the Banc de Barcelona and for decades of the Chamber of Commerce and, above all, the Chamber of Industry. A building that has experienced moments of splendor that are now not even mentioned when visiting the current palace.

We could follow the loss of collective memory if we went up to 22 Portal del Ángel and remembered that there is no reference to the fact that it was the former headquarters of Catalana de Gas, one of the companies that has its roots and success in the brilliant second third of the 19th century, but which goes by the name Natural– until it moved to the tower between Barceloneta Park and the Zoological Park, next to the sea on the Ronda Litoral, now changing its name to Naturgy. A plaque commemorating the building, built by Catalana de Gas in the 1890s, which also traces its origins to the introduction of gas lighting in Barcelona, ​​would cost little. The company has been well chronicled by Pere A. Fàbregas, and the founder's lineage – Pere Gil y Babot and his sons, including Pau Gil y Serra, who left the legacy with which the Hospital de Sant Pau was built – by Martín Rodrigo.

All of this reminds us how perverse this effort is to hide why important buildings in the center of Barcelona were built, when we should be showcasing the economic, technological, and business dynamism of Barcelona in the second third of the 19th century, which maintained and expanded its Hispanic leadership until after the Great War. Manuel Girona was absolutely decisive in the economic development of Catalonia. He was instrumental in this due to his heritage, his commercial training, his investment acumen, but above all, his vision of the future, reflected in the construction of part of the railway network, the construction of the Urgell Canal, the creation of the Bank of Barcelona, ​​​​his association in the promotion of manufacturing and commercial businesses, and the financing of the new university, among others.