Seven floors, more than a thousand employees serving the public, and another six hundred, including dressmakers and tailors, who worked in the workshops of the same building. Its clientele, especially the upper middle class and women, could find here the newest and most elegant fashion dictated by the major European capitals, and 25 trucks were in charge of delivering it to their homes. There was also a grocery store, a post office and telephone, a hairdresser, a library, a concert hall, a reading room, a photography studio, a boudoir for mailing and a nice restaurant where shoppers could eat, dine or have five o’clock tea.
This was El Siglo, the luxury department store, pioneer in introducing a new sales system in Barcelona and Spain. At this time, the end of the 19th century, the city’s commerce was nourished by small family establishments dedicated to a single product, the seller showed the merchandise behind the counter, and haggling was mandatory.
The upper classes used to receive their suppliers at their own homes, and even those who had money to spend and the desire to follow fashions, used to travel to Paris to purchase the latest products. But very few could afford such trips, and traditional stores were becoming too small for the new and thriving urban bourgeoisie.
It was then, in 1881, when a young businessman, Eduardo Conde, opened the El Siglo Department Store which, in the style of Harrods in London, Les Grands Magacins du Louvre and Le Printemps in Paris, or Macy’s in New York, totally revolutionized the habits of buys.
Eduardo Conde was born in Madrid, and at the age of 13 he was sent to Havana. There he began working as an apprentice in a store dedicated to import and export trade. In 1858 he traveled to New York, a mission that helped him assimilate the commercial and administrative methods of the then-fledgling American Department Stores.
In 1865 he returned to Spain accompanied by his wife’s family, the Gómez del Olmo family, and his brother-in-law, Pablo Puerto. The family clan settled in Barcelona and founded the company Conde, Puerto y Cía, opening a first store dedicated to the export and sale of shirts on La Rambla.
The business prospers, and they decide to embark on a new adventure. On February 1, 1881, the El Siglo Department Stores opened on Rambla de Estudios. It was a spectacular store, illuminated with electric light, with five independent entrances, an area to park carriages and many sections full of goods, the likes of which had never been seen in Barcelona! Something similar would not appear in Madrid until the post-war period.
The experience was received with such enthusiasm that, in 1891, El Siglo was forced to move to larger facilities, to which it added several floors after a year. The architect Leocadio de Olabarría, son-in-law of Eduardo Conde, was in charge of unifying the complex that reached 32,000 square meters of surface. The different sections were organized around very large interior patios, with large staircases and skylights that provided light and ventilation. There were no escalators yet, but there were several elevators, each with its own elevator operator who also acted as a guide for the clientele.
To increase sales, El Siglo used advertising, mail order, publishing a catalog magazine and a newspaper. They were the first to give balloons to children, and in the workplace they implemented very advanced conditions for the time, such as medical-pharmaceutical assistance for employees and their families and paid vacations. Of course, the clerks had great discipline, they were obliged to wear a uniform, and the “sigleras”, dressed in black with a pleated skirt, had to be an example of good presence, kindness and correctness.
The business is very profitable, which is why other, although more modest, department stores appear in Barcelona: Barato, Águila, Jorba, Capitol and Damián. But neither the new competition nor the crisis of ’29 were an object of concern for the Conde family who, at Christmas 1932, were sure that the campaign would be a success.
However, on December 25, around 11 in the morning, the alarm sounded at the city’s fire stations. The El Siglo warehouses were burning. The fire had started in a little electric train that was circling in the window, and in just two hours all seven floors of the building burned without the firefighters being able to stop it.
Not only did the entire building disappear, but the Reyes campaign, which accounted for 50% of sales for the entire year, also completely evaporated. The losses, assumed by 20 insurance companies, were estimated at around thirty million pesetas (about 1,000 million euros).
But the fire did not end the enthusiasm of the Conde family. In December 1933, El Siglo reopened at 54 Pelayo Street, a much smaller building with only 300 employees, which began to function well, but the political situation prevented it from progressing.
In 1936, the El Siglo stores were collectivized, and UGT took over management. In ’39, when the Conde family returns from exile, the department stores are almost empty and decapitalized. After a little less than a year, without having recovered the normal rhythm, the Second World War begins.
Despite the difficulties, El Siglo continued ahead, but in 1953, pressured by a lack of liquidity, it accepted a capital increase that put it in the hands of another group of shareholders who also owned its neighbors, Almacenes Capitol. Times had changed and the prestige of Siglo was declining until it disappeared definitively in 1983. The Belgian fashion chain C