In less than two centuries Sant Feliu de Guíxols, in the heart of the Costa Brava, has gone from being a society that lived mainly from fishing, maritime trade and boat building to being an outstanding tourist destination, with great weight today. on the day of second homes. But between one sector and another, from the end of the 19th century and until the First World War especially, it became an outstanding center of the cork industry that exported to the whole world (Sydney, Bangkok, Istanbul, Bogotá, San Francisco, Calcutta, Port Sudan…). The municipality had about forty factories that in 1901 already employed more than 3,200 people, of which approximately 30% were women.
Boosted by the train, which reached the same port, the cork industry (today there is only one company left) took the name of Sant Feliu de Guíxols to half the world. “It was an industry very focused on foreign trade; Businessmen in the sector sent their children to study abroad and some opened branches in California, New York and Australia. Several countries have set up consular offices here,” explains Sílvia Alemany, director of the Museum of History of Sant Feliu de Guíxols. This cultural facility hosts an exhibition that allows you to discover the evolution of the society of Sant Feliu de Guíxols over the last 200 years.
If the construction of steamboats was a blow to the shipyards in the area, which progressively abandoned the activity of manual boatbuilding, the emergence of steam itself made the cork industry grow, which lost weight with the two world wars and the civil War. “Many industries were destroyed; That, added to the cork crisis, made many businessmen convert to the tourism sector or diversify their activity,” explains Alemany.
Tourism was not massive until the 1960s. In 1950, the municipality had only three inns and three hotels, which mainly accommodated summer visitors from Barcelona, ??as well as merchants, captains or shipowners. A figure that had multiplied by 22 in 1970, when there were already 135 establishments, including hotels, inns and campsites that mainly housed European tourists.
The need for labor to build tourist infrastructure and provide service to hotels and restaurants led to “a second wave of migration and the emergence of new neighborhoods, such as Vilartagues,” explains Xavier Roca, museum technician. The first – explains Roca – coincided with the construction of the train track, which arrived in 1892, the rise of the cork factories and the construction of the port.
But before this massive emergence of tourism, the municipality had already witnessed several initiatives, such as spa tourism, thanks to the public baths of Sant Elm or the Viatges Blaus, an initiative promoted by the Barcelona-based businessman Jaume Marill among 1929 and 1936, consisting of chartering large ships, with coblas and corals that enlivened the trip from Barcelona, ??to discover the landscape of the Costa Brava.
A prominent name in the exhibition is Ramon Gay, a businessman who knew how to adapt to the times. As a riverside carpenter he manually created hundreds of traditional fishing boats. After the Civil War, he converted some of those boats into boats for taking tourists. Thus, the Costa Brava Cruises emerged, operating between 1960 and 1979, which transported tourists from Blanes to Llafranc. Another visionary was Vicenç Gandol, who in the sixties created a private tourist office from which he rented houses to tourists, sold cruise tickets or tickets to the bullfights.
Currently, the hotel offer consists of a total of 23 accommodations, and second homes have a great weight.
