The last ones of the Central Market

A fishmonger, a delicatessen, a butcher shop, a bakery, a salted fish stall, a poultry shop, and a greengrocer's. That was all that remained of Valls' Central Market in the winter of 2009. Five traders kept open the last seven stalls of a facility that had been dying for a long time.

A few days later, in January 2010, once the Christmas holidays were over, the market definitively lowered its shutters. More than twenty-five years of history of a covered market, with free parking and conceived as a commercial reference point for Valls and the entire Alt Camp region, came to an end.

The local press wrote rivers of ink about the reasons for the closure. There was talk of the population's lack of habit of shopping at the market or the impact of new commercial formats installed on the outskirts of the city. But, in essence, the outcome was due to the economic difficulties of a private initiative. Unpaid bills and arrears had ultimately made the continuity of the last stallholders unsustainable.

More than fifteen years later, Valls' Central Market continues to appear, from time to time, in public debate. Editorials, opinion articles, and urban planning proposals have raised the possibility of recovering that commercial space or giving it a new use. Meanwhile, the building continues to occupy a strategic location in the city.

Its architecture is a product of the time it was conceived. Built in the eighties, the Central Market presents an industrial language typical of the era and stands at a pivotal point on the urban map: next to the Font de la Manxa, by the Caputxins promenade, and opposite the axis of the Montblanc road.

Before the market was built there, however, those lands had been occupied by the old Vallduví textile factory. The factory complex was demolished in 1981, and only the chimney was preserved, a brick structure about 25 meters high, with a base of four meters by four meters, which today protrudes, integrated into the building's facade. To ensure its preservation, the chimney is the property of the Valls City Council.

At the foot of this industrial vestige, there is a monumental ceramic relief, installed at the request of the Institut d'Estudis Vallencs. The work, by Pere Solé, depicts a weave of intertwined threads that evokes the textile past of a space that, before becoming a market, had been one of the city's industrial enclaves.

Perhaps over the years, we will have to expand the monument to pay tribute to the last ones in the market.