A debt and a coincidence are behind the first villa that was built in 1924 in the urbanization of S’Agaró, the garden city designed by the businessman Josep Ensesa Gubert and the noucentist architect Rafael Masó, and which has become one of the most iconic developments on the Costa Brava.
The history of this first house, named Senya Blanca in allusion to a small white wall prior to construction that fishermen used to find their way around, began to be written in 1916 in land without access to drinking water or electricity, frequented only by a herd of goats. “My great-grandfather and grandfather, who ran a flour industry in Girona, had a client in Sant Feliu de Guíxols who owed them money. The client settled this debt with some land near the sea, on top of some rocks, a place without a single tree. My grandfather, who had a great business vision, convinced his father to buy other nearby land and that’s how it all started”, explains Virgínia Ensesa Viñas, one of the granddaughters of the architect of the urbanization and president of the Associació S’Agaró 100, created to commemorate the centenary of the birth of this residential town that has around 180 homes and the La Gavina hostel, a five-star super luxury, where celluloid personalities such as Ava Gardner have paraded , Frank Sinatra or Elizabeth Taylor, among many others.
After the purchase of the land by businessman Josep Ensesa Pujadas, eight years passed before the first villa was built there. This remote and unpopulated area was not very attractive, so the businessman went so far as to promise the first person who wanted to build a house there that he would give him the land.
Virgínia Ensesa explains that a “coincidence” was added to Senya Blanca’s birth. “My grandfather was summering in L’Estartit at the time and his lease on a fisherman’s cottage where he was staying was about to expire,” he recalls. This is how Josep Ensesa son took his father’s word for it and assured him that he would be the first to build a house on the land he had bought. In 1922, work began and on July 24, 1924, Josep Ensesa Gubert and his family spent the first night there.
Senya Blanca, which is still owned by the Ensesa family, was the embryo of one of the first garden cities on the Costa Brava, located between the beaches of Sant Pol (Sant Feliu de Guíxols) and Sa Conca (Platja d’ Hoop). A complex considered a cultural asset of national interest (BCIN) in the category of historical complex and which has the luxury hostel La Gavina, founded in 1932, another of its references. Of the six houses that were part of the first block of housing, which would later be one of the most exclusive developments, two failed to sell. “These two independent chalets came together to create the hostel, which at the beginning only had 11 rooms”, remembers Virgínia Ensesa, who yesterday presented at an event held on the S’Agaró cycle path, also promoted by her avi, the activities that in 2024 will serve to commemorate the centenary of the construction of this first chalet.
Highlights include, among others, an exhibition on the evolution of tourism, urban planning and architecture, which can be seen between June and September 2024 at the Palau Robert in Barcelona and at the end of the year at the Casa de Cultura in Girona, and the creation of a life-size bronze sculpture of the complex’s visionary and architect, which will be permanently placed in Plaça del Mirador in May next year.
