* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia
I have captured these images for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos in Cardona, in Bages, where we found these two old public washhouses. In one, water has not flowed from the fountain for a long time. In the other, if it does not rain soon, it will have little left to stay dry.
The legacy of public laundries (“safarejos”) is notable in Catalonia, where they have even given rise to popular expressions such as “fer safareig”, that is, sharing gossip, in public.
In principle, a laundry room is the place where clothes are washed, but it was much more about this component also of social relations.
In fact, before the introduction of running water in homes, towns used to have a public laundry room where women went to do their laundry. Curiously, today there are laundromats where people get together to wash their clothes if they don’t have a washing machine at home.
The old public laundries generally had a stone slab to beat the clothes by hand or with the washing shovel. In tenement houses or rural homes, the laundry space was traditionally located on the ground floor or basement.
In Barcelona, ??for example, in 1849, there were 42 public laundries in what is now the Ciutat Vella district.
