Some reliefs on some capitals of the main door of Santa Maria del Mar show some workers carrying heavy loads. It is a tribute to the bastaixos, the group that between the 13th and 15th centuries did the work of unloaders in the port of Barcelona and who constituted an important link in the value chain of freight transport. But they were also the great promoters, together with the workers of the sea and the neighbors, of the construction of the church.
The bastaixos were in charge of transporting the stones from the Montjuïc quarry to the construction site. They did it voluntarily, out of devotion, and their titanic effort was immortalized in the bestseller La catedral del mar, by Ildefonso Falcones. “At that moment a bastaix arrived loaded with a huge stone. Sweat ran from his forehead to his calves and all his muscles stood out, tense, vibrating to the rhythm of the steps that brought him closer to the church. But he smiled.”
The above is one of the fragments that describes the work of the bastaixos in the novel. These workers had a slave origin, but at the beginning of the 14th century they were all free. The construction of Santa Maria del Mar began in this period, in 1329. The church was consecrated in 1384. They were a humble brotherhood that used their scarce financial resources to assist the widows of their companions and the elderly . That is why their contribution to the achievement of the church was their work as porters.
Although the church was erected with the support of the ecclesiastical authorities, the money was donated mainly by merchants and the town of La Ribera itself, the then fishing district of Barcelona. The king provided only permission to extract the stone from Montjuïc.
“From the scaffolding, the masons stopped what they were doing and leaned out to see the arrival of the stones that they would have to work on later. Behind the first bastaix another appeared, and another, and another, all hunched over. The noise of the chisel against the stones surrendered to the humble workers of the Barcelona riverside and for a few moments the entire Santa Maria was bewitched”, relates another of the fragments of The Cathedral of the Sea.
