The Palau de la Música Catalana is a jewel of modernism, the only concert hall in the world listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Perhaps this is why the people of Barcelona have forgotten what the price was to pay to build it: the demolition of the convent of San Francisco de Paula, a building steeped in history.
The saddest thing about the case is that the most unique part of the complex, the church, could have been saved. Many will remember that parish, which was next to the Palau for a hundred years until in 2002, not without controversy, it was demolished to make an auxiliary building, the work of architect Óscar Tusquets.
This story begins long before Domènech i Montaner (architect of the Palau), modernism or the Orfeó Català. It begins in 1569, when the first community of the order founded by the Italian saint Francisco de Paula, that of the Minims, arrived in the city. At first, the Consell de Cent (the municipal government) gave them the convent of Los Angeles (a building that is now part of the MACBA), but after three years they were banished to a hermitage on the south side of the Montjuïc mountain, hanging on the cliff overlooking the sea.
The place was inhospitable and was at the mercy of the pirates who in those years harassed the Catalan coast, so in 1578 they left, although it is not known where exactly (in an article about the case, the specialist Josep M. Prunés proposes the Fort Pienc). Wherever it was, they stayed for a short time, since in 1589 they found a definitive location, on Sant Pere Més Alt street in the Sant Pere neighborhood.
The convent they built occupied everything that is now the Palau de la Música plus the rest of the block, in addition to the La Salle Comtal school. The complex featured a cloister three galleries high and, of course, the church, which had a single nave with side chapels and a monumental bell tower in baroque style and with a rectangular floor plan.
We cannot talk about this place and not mention the Black Death, which made it infamous. For some reason the belief spread that it was the Italian saint who had to be prayed to in case of an epidemic, and this compromised the friars of Sant Pere Més Alt street, whether they wanted it or not.
When the disease reached the city in 1589 – killing around 12,000 people – they were assigned a morbidity, which is what the places where those infected were isolated were called. It is assumed that one of the brothers would die caring for the plagued. And the worst was yet to come.
In 1651 there was another outbreak, this time aggravated because Barcelona was under siege by the monarchy’s troops, in one of the last stages of the Reapers’ War. Seeing them coming, since the plague had already devastated València, on March 27 the Consell de Cent organized a procession to the church of San Francisco de Paula, followed by another on April 17, and immediately afterwards it prohibited any other gathering of people and closed it. the city in stone. As was customary, the request for divine intercession came first, and then the prophylaxis.
After the lock was struck, our convent was in charge of housing the infected women – the men would go to the nearby convent of San Agustín – and burying the deceased in a nearby orchard. Between one thing and another, the disease took its toll on the friars, killing fifteen of them, as Josep M. Prunés discovered. When the plague had subsided, after a year, the death toll in the city was close to 30,000.
In the following centuries, the cult of the saint continued to be a source of support for the people of Barcelona in times of calamity. Also after the confiscation of the Count of Toreno in 1835, he closed the convent, but kept the church open, now as a regular parish.
Everything else was bought by a French family and an industrialist from Amposta, who set up a textile factory to which everything happened. In 1852 he exploded the boiler of one of the steam engines, killing three workers and destroying the entire gallery in which he was located. As the newspaper El Áncora explained the next day, the explosion was so strong that it sent a piece of the boiler to Plaza Urquinaona. And they had not recovered from this when, after four years, a fire destroyed half the factory and the entire interior of the parish.
When the Orfeó Català bought the property in 1904 to demolish it, only the cloister of the old convent was still recognizable, so no one complained about the measure. A different thing happened a century later, when they announced that they wanted to do the same with the church to expand the Palau.
After a second fire (during the Civil War the church was looted and burned by anarchist militiamen) and two restorations that could be said to have been worse than the flames, little remained of its old baroque luster, but it would have something, because parishioners, part of public opinion and even the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi opposed its disappearance.
In the end, the city council, the Generalitat, the State… and the archbishopric, by the way, which sided with them, won the battle. As reader Jesús Fraiz Ordóñez recalled in a recent participation in La Vanguardia, the archbishop of the time, Ricard Maria Carles, wrote an article in the same newspaper in which he disdained the architectural value of the temple. He did not count, perhaps, on the sentimental value.
