The historic and traveling Font del Ninyu preserves one of the few surviving shields of the old municipality of Sants before it was annexed to Barcelona in 1897. The fountain dates back to the 1880s and has since had three locations before being installed in its current location in the Can Mantega gardens.
The fountain has three other shields sculpted in the stone: that of Castile, that of Catalonia and that of Barcelona, ??but that of Sants is especially relevant, formed by an image of the Virgin rising above some clouds. In reality, it is the old parish seal of Santa Maria de Sants, which was adopted by the town hall of the old municipality.
The fountain was originally installed in Osca Square, the old nerve center of the town when the market was held there. It consists of a stone base of several sections surmounted by the sculpture of a child whose left hand holds a jug resting on his head. The right one rests on another prone jug from which water flows.
The monument remained in Osca Square until 1913, when the market was moved to its current location. Then, the fountain was moved to the missing Víctor Balaguer square, in what is today the confluence of Carrer de Sants with Ronda del Mig and where the old town hall was. It was precisely the construction of the belt that forced the fountain to be removed in 1969. A year later, he traveled to Can Mantega, a green area inaugurated in 1962 that takes its name from an old farmhouse.
From the beginning, the fountain became a symbol of the residents of Sants. In fact, the installation in Can Mantega occurred after a neighborhood mobilization that managed to rescue it from the municipal warehouse where it was relegated after its removal from Plaza Víctor Balaguer. The presence of the sculpture of the child made the fountain known as nen, which soon led to the popular expression of ninyu.
