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The origins of the Turo Park Gardens date back to 1912, when the Bertrand Girona family, made up of the married couple Josep Bertrand i Salsas and Manuela Girona i Clavé, decided to set up an amusement park.
They chose some land that they owned in the area close to what is now the Francesc Macià square so that it would rent them greater benefits than those they received from renting this plot dedicated to agricultural work.
His intention was to take advantage of that area of ??the city, where the upper class lived, to provide them with a place of entertainment separate from the massive concentration of parks located on Paseo de Gracia. In addition, this would make these places a serious competition, since the wealthy class, accustomed to living in landscaped palaces, was not conducive to mixing with the multitude of visitors that packed those other venues.
The future park would have a perimeter that would start on the mountain side at the Valero estate, go down Calvet to Mestre Nicolau, from there it would go to Ballescà street (now Ganduxer), with an undeveloped environment, with hardly any buildings, except for the group located around the Galvany market, built on the grounds of the Camp d’en Galvany, with the gardens of Montmartre.
The park had three entrances. One in the southern area on the current Pau Casals avenue, another near the current Sant Gregori Taumaturgo square and the third on Calvet street on the corner with Calaf.
The number of attractions and recreational areas would be among the most modern and would initially consist of the following facilities:
The amusement park was inaugurated on Saturday June 15, 1912, with offers of shows and fireworks, offering an extraordinary tram service and the Carril de Sarrià (the train as it should be called at that time).
In 1913, an annual dog contest began to reward the best specimens of each breed, in which the mezzo soprano Conchita Supervía participated, who with her puppy was awarded a canine prize.
In 1920, they began to celebrate the Feast of Nations, in which they brought together all the foreign representatives who were in the city.
In 1922, a Jura de Bandera was held at its facilities, which was attended by countless audiences, an act that could be seen from the Camp d’en Galvany esplanade.
That same year, the Babies Party was held, a contest in which parents and grandparents decorated their little ones with the best decorations to stand out and demonstrate their economic power.
The high society of those times was very fickle in terms of leisure preferences and quickly tired of repeating the same entertainment venues, despite the changing acts of shows they offered.
In 1929 it closed its doors. The Bertrand-Girona family, who also owned other land in the area, proposed a pact to the acting council: it gave them the land of the amusement park for the city in exchange for being able to develop the rest of the land they owned in the area.
In 1934, the City Council commissioned the architect Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí (teacher of garden architecture at the Higher School of Fine Crafts of the Community of Catalonia), the remodeling of the park.
The attractions were replaced by the gardens, with the trees and flowers, among which the holm oaks, the date palms of the Canary Islands, the precious magnolias and some hundred-year-old carob trees recovered from the old agricultural lands stood out.
During the tour in the grassy area the visitor found benches to sit next to the sculpture of La Bien Plantada, a work made by Eloïsa Cerdan.
When Turó Park ceased to be an amusement park from 1927 to simply become a public garden, the puppet theater continued to be active sporadically.
In the 1950s, puppet performances returned to the gardens with the Pulchinelas Inglés, who performed sporadically, especially in summer and who, thanks to the continuity of their son Jaume, continued to offer their shows until the 1970s.
The appearance of television and the increase in weekend houses reduced the public to the performances and the puppets gradually disappeared from the Turó Park Gardens.
The park is accessed via Avinguda de Pau Casals, which goes up from Plaça Francesc Macià, current number of the walk with the legacy of democracy. Previously, Avenida General Goded, a number preserved during the dictatorship, since Goded was the general who ordered Franco to come from Mallorca to Barcelona in 1936 to support the coup d’état.
On July 19, he was arrested and detained by the Republican authorities, forced to confess over the radio the failure of the uprising in Barcelona and declare his surrender. He was tried by a court martial, which found him guilty. He was shot along with other soldiers on August 12, 1936, in the moats of the Montjuïc castle.
