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The history of the Mont d’O College building has its beginnings at the beginning of the 20th century, when the geographer educator Joan Palau i Vera, of Venezuelan origin but who practiced his professional work in Catalonia, founded an experimental private school.
The son of Joan Palau, a merchant dedicated to importing and exporting to America, and María Jesús Vera, daughter of Chilean landowners, while they were settling in Barcelona, ??they made Joan study at the boarding school at the Escuelas Pías de Barcelona.
Subsequently, he was sent to study in Germany, where he decided to continue his career as a teacher, making it compatible with studying Philosophy at the University of Barcelona.
The Mont d’Or College (Golden Mountain) was a modernist palace that was distributed on a ground floor and three heights, which ended up crowned by an ornate dome. It was inaugurated in 1905, it was located at number 144 Carril street (now Vía Augusta), in front of the ditch of the railway line that linked the towns of Barcelona and Sarrià.
Joan Palau i Vera founded the experimental private school in Barcelona that day, following the same criteria as the British Cecil Reddie, from the New School Abbotsholem; and the German Hermann Lietz, from Deustch Landerzie-Kungsheime.
The students organized in small groups would live in a boarding school, together with the teachers, to establish a mutual relationship between them. The student’s contact with nature would be another of the postulates of this teaching system.
The school occupied the building until 1910, since from that date it moved to the Masía de Can Bogunyà, in the city of Terrassa.
It continued working in a building with the same name, although with a different academic address. In an advertisement in La Vanguardia on Sunday, September 20, 1925, its Director announced: “Mr. B T. WALTEKS, B. A. (Graduate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Oxford, England, the beginning of the next course on the 28th of same month”.
On Sunday, September 18, 1910, La Vanguardia on page 12 published an announcement, in which it informed readers of an explanatory note, separating its school from the New Mont d’Or School, which was operating in its old building. , directed by the parents of the students who had not agreed to go to the town of Terrassa.
The building was finally acquired in 1915 by the surgeon and traumatologist, Dr. Josep Soler Roig, who converted part of it into the Dr. Josep Soler Roig Clinic, which made modifications, with changes in the layout of the access stairs to facilitate the arrival of ambulances and the admission of the sick and their evacuation.
After the civil war, the clinic underwent a thorough renovation, changing its original appearance. All the modernist elements were removed: the dome, the semicircular pediment of the façade and all the sculpted railings.
A floor was added to increase capacity and thus provide greater availability to assist a greater number of patients.
On November 27, 1945, the painter Josep Maria Sert i Badia, who had decorated the neoclassical cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic in 1900 and who had works in the United States and several European countries, died in one of its rooms.
Later, in the 1950s, the clinic moved to Calle Vallmajor on the corner of Freixa, in a building designed in 1952 by the architect Francesc Mitjans, with a height of four floors, arranged against the unevenness of Calle Freixa, in the that faces the building, and that of Vallmajor, located on the same level as the lot. Currently, it is the Augusta Park Residence.
Francesc Mitjans Miró was the architect who, in 1957, built the Nou Camp stadium, which is currently undergoing a remodeling to adapt it to the new times.
José Soler-Roig Elizaizin was a great athlete and a better surgeon who, in October 1974, received the Pedro Virgilio Award. The old building was demolished at the end of the 1960s. Today it is a residential building.
