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The missing mansion of Jacobo García de San Pedro -Marqués de Soto Hermoso, located at 325 Provenza Street on the corner of Bailén Street, was built in 1898 by the modernist architect Emili Sala i Cortés who, in the last quarter of the 19th century, had made a series of important works:
Emili Sala designed a mansion in an eclectic French style divided into three parts: a larger central body and two higher outer bodies finished with separate towers with mansard roofs. Two low bodies continued at the ends with a series of small openings intended to give light to the interior. It was built between 1899 and 1900.
The Palauet did not have a direct entrance from the street, since it was all surrounded by a low wall finished with an iron fence and a small door on the left side as you looked at it to enter the garden, which gave entrance to the building. Properly said.
On the ground floor of the central body, the spectacular entrance door stood out, divided into three parts: the central one (the real entrance door) was followed by two stone columns and two openings closed with a glass panel that gave natural light to the lobby. ; On the outside, a window on each side served to give light to the interior room.
On the main floor, a central stone balcony the size of the entrance door gave access to a balcony that was accompanied on the sides by two windows following the line marked by the ground floor.
The upper floor gave an example of the artistic quality of Emili Sala. It is impossible to highlight the solution given to the enclosure in which, in the center of the façade, the coat of arms of the Marquis of Soto Hermoso stands out.
The two exterior bodies made with the same line as the ground floor had a window and, on the main floor, a balcony made of carved stone and another side exit that gave way to a terrace that covered the two ground floor buildings at the ends. .
The upper floor had a window following the line of the lower floor and ended with an enclosure in which the tame roof stood out (mansard: French roof with broken slopes, with the lower part wider than the upper part), in which four lightning rods stood out. very common in buildings of those times and a window in the central part of the front.
With the death of the Marquis, the property was put up for sale in 1931 by the Soto Hermoso family and acquired by the French Institute of Barcelona, ??with the sponsorship of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote secondary courses, section fourth of the General Benevolent Society “secondary cours, quadrième section of the Société Génerale de Bienfaisance.”
The acceptance of the center exceeded the expectations of its managers, which motivated the center’s management to decide to build a three-story building attached to the palace in the garden of the institute’s mansion, on the side of Bailén Street.
At that time nothing suggested the coup d’état and the subsequent civil war. On February 17, 1937, in one of the raids carried out by the Italian aviation, he unloaded a series of bombs that hit the roofs of the buildings squarely. As a result, there were major damages and what was worse, the death of a student.
After the civil war ended, due to the Second World War, the center went through a difficult period and it was not until 1944 that teaching activities were resumed with natural effectiveness and courses were resumed by the children of French and French residents. the children of Spaniards who wanted their children to follow the training that French citizens received.
In the 1960s, with the new concept of education, the widening of the city on both sides of the historic center, those responsible for the French Lyceum and the French Institute were disintegrating the old study center, progressively moving their classrooms to different districts of the city. count. The first transfers took place to the buildings on Moià and Pedralbes streets.
The old palace of the Marquis of Soto Hermoso was vacated in 1971. Would it be possible to save the building and dedicate it to some cultural activity?
As mayor of Barcelona we had the right person to fail in a continuity project, José María de Porcioles Colomer, a native of Amer, who had become mayor on March 19, 1957 and was not very enthusiastic about the conservation of architectural heritage. .
The builder Núñez i Navarro, as always willing to acquire buildings, took over the mansion to demolish it and build one of his many buildings built in one of the corners of Barcelona’s Eixample, which he named the Núñez-Liceo Building.
