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The current location, located in front of the old Teatro Principal, at the exit of Calle de Escudellers, was a small esplanade that had its beginnings due to the demolition of Portal dels Ollers when the third wall of Barcelona was built.
It was next to the road that went down parallel to the bed of the primitive Riera d’en Malla (the current Rambla) to the marshes that were in the current Puerta de la Paz.
Later, in 1887, with its detour along Caspe Street, the stream disappeared, it was urbanized and the small esplanade remained in that place. The municipal authorities, seeing the narrowness of the place, decided to decorate it with a fountain, which was decorated with the figure of a faun with a jug in his hand. It was inaugurated as the Font del Sàtir, about which little information is known, except that it was a poor quality watering hole.
It was the municipal authorities who had the Font del Sàtir built in 1802, but, seeing the disaster, since it was criticized by everyone, they decided, in 1817, to remove it from the site and build another one of higher quality.
Given the failure of the first fountain, the authorities decided that the small esplanade would be a meeting place for all those people who wandered through the area. At first they thought of placing a statue that would give a bit of visibility to the waits.
They contacted Pere Serra i Bosch, a soldier and architect who participated in the works of the fortification of Barcelona in 1798, so that he could design a fountain of better quality than that of the satyr and that would be liked by all the people who saw it. .
Pere Serra presented a sketch that gave life to what the artist wanted to represent. It alluded to the main water supplies for the city, with four symbolic sculptures of the waters of the Llobregat, the Urgell Canal, the Condal irrigation canal and the Port.
On the part of scholars there are several misgivings about the allocation of one of the statues to the Urgell Canal, first because the water did not reach the city through said canal and second because the construction of the canal took place after the creation of the company del Canal de Urgel S. A., which according to a share certificate is dated February 2, 1854.
Although the first serious studies for the construction of the Urgell Canal were ordered by Charles I in 1506 and Philip II in 1554, 1574 and 1577, the works did not prosper for different reasons.
Ignacio Girona i Targa and the Brothers, Clavé y Cía., who owned a kind of bank, were the ones who took the reins of the project, purchasing many lands in the area and building the Castell del Remei estate. On November 3, 1852, they obtained a Royal Decree from the central government, with the concession of the works on the Urgell canal. On December 28, 1852, the formation of the Canal Joint Stock Company was authorized.
The fountain was made by the sculptors Damià Campeny and Salvador Gurri, it was built on a pedestal in the shape of a truncated pyramid from whose base the water jets came out and in the upper center of the pedestal a sculpture representing the Roman goddess Minerva was placed, Gurri’s work.
Possibly, Damià Campeny and Salvador Gurri, when they designed the fountain, knew about the construction project of the Urgell Canal and thought that sooner or later the canal would be built and they wanted to annex it to the new project.
At the base of the pedestal, four niches were placed, with the subsequent allegorical figures, placing the figure of an old man with a beard (hence the popular name of the Old Man’s fountain), semi-naked leaning on some rocks with a cornucopia in his right hand and With his left he leaned on a jug from which water fell. La Font del Vell was inaugurated in 1818.
The area in those times was frequented by people who took advantage of the little light that there was then in the place at night to relieve themselves, which was the reason for the city council to make the decision to demolish it and in its place build underground services that They served to clean up the square.
The figures of Minerva and the Old Man were the only ones preserved from the missing fountain. That of Minerva de Gurri was temporarily placed in the Citadel Park, later passing in front of the Maritime Museum, today it is preserved in a municipal warehouse in Nou Barris.
The figure of the Old Man, made by Damià Campeny, was also located in the Ciudadela Park until its definitive transfer to Plaza de Sants and placed on a small pedestal on February 1, 1975 by mayor Enrique Masó i Vázquez.
In one of these movements, the figure of the Old Man received a blow that caused him to lose part of his nose, which is why the popular imagination once again acted, converting the Font del Vell into the Font del Xato.
Today the square as such has disappeared, having been annexed to Las Ramblas. In its place there is a monument dedicated to Federico Soler Hubert, better known as Federic Soler Pitarra, playwright, poet and theater entrepreneur.
