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The old house of Antonia Burés i Borràs and Leodegario Torrens i Serra, a rich textile entrepreneur of Manresano origin, was preceded by the intention of the couple to build their residence at calle Ausias March 42-46, close to the one built by his brother Francesc Burés and Borràs, at numbers 30-32 of the same street.
It was designed by the architect Juli Batllevell i Arús and built between 1903 and 1906 by the building contractor Enric Pi i Cabañas. The building consisted of a ground floor and four floors.
The façade was made with a different filigree of balconies on each of the floors. In the main one, a continuous stone balcony was flanked by two side galleries also made of stone.
On the first floor, the railings of the five balconies were made of wrought iron, the three central ones and the side ones made of stone, to match the upper part of the stands on the lower floor.
On the two upper floors, the five balconies had wrought iron railings, but with a different shape in the structure of the two floors.
On the fourth floor, the upper finish is based on a semicircular arch with a stone filigree on the four exterior balconies and the central one features a sculpture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The upper enclosure was shaped like a semicircular arch matching each of the five balconies.
On the street side, five doors were built to match the line of the entire façade, the central one as the entrance door to the floors and the others as the entrance to the ground floor. This party was the cause of the dispute over the architect who designed the building.
Between the first and second and fourth and fifth low doors there were two tree-shaped columns that gave the impression that they were built to support the weight of the two stands. This was representative of Gaudí’s constructions and it was difficult for them to have been designed by Pi i Cabañas, however, it was done by his disciple Juli Batllevell i Arús.
These two trees were the trigger for the mistrust on the part of the heirs Juli Batllevell and the perseverance of the art critic Josep Casamartina i Parassols to attribute his project to Enric Pi and which marked the subsequent conflict over the audit.
This struggle to know the authorship of the project has lasted almost a century, since everyone originally gave Enric Pi i Cabañas as the author. The end of the heirs’ struggle came to fruition in 1992, when they found a copy of the project that had been signed by Juli Batllevell.
With reference to Francesc Burés i Borràs, Antonia’s brother, I already wrote an article as the former owner of the Burés house located in Ausias March 32, corner with calle Girona, manufacturer of the El Burrito Blanco blankets, which closed its doors definitively in 1991.
Antonia Burés was a woman with a very strong personality who was not cowed by anything and never shied away from confrontations when she believed she was right.
In 1908 he ordered the construction of a grandiose modernist building in Manresa designed in the Plaza de Ficus i Pala by the architect Ignacia Oms i Pansa.
Once the building was built and, when Antonia Burés confirmed the lack of health of the water she received at her home due to the impurity of the waters of the Cardener River, she filed a complaint in 1926 against the company Minas de Potasa de Suria S. A.
This confrontation in those times by a woman against a large company meant that the people, from then on. He nicknamed her La Bureas. But that’s another story
