An old plaque on the Rambla, almost on the corner with the Pasaje de la Banca, draws attention. It announces the Royal Canal of the Infanta, and under a shield stands out the name Doña Luisa Carlota de Borbón. And it is that on the other side of the wall is the headquarters of this historic ditch that formerly irrigated the fields of Baix Llobregat, L’Hospitalet and Sants, then an independent municipality of Barcelona. It is a floor —a principal— from where the interests of the remaining irrigators are still managed.
The headquarters of this society is accessed by a staircase in the Pasaje de la Banca. The apartment has been the headquarters of the channel since at least 1886. An advertisement in La Vanguardia on those dates, referring to some agreements made by the board, attests to this. At that time, the passage was called del Comercio. The Canal de la Infanta was a water pipe for irrigation captured from the Llobregat river built between 1817 and 1820. It ran for just over 17 kilometers and crossed the municipalities of Molins de Rei, Santa Creu d’Olorda, Sant Feliu, Sant Joan Despí , Cornellà, L’Hospitalet and Sants.
The promoters found the support of General Francisco Javier Castaños, then Captain General of Catalonia, who became their main defender. She is called de la Infanta due to Luisa Carlota de Borbón, wife of Francisco de Paula Borbón, younger brother of Fernando VII. Taking advantage of a stay in Barcelona, ??he was asked to inaugurate the canal when the works had not yet finished. And so it happened on May 21, 1819. The canal still supplies water to the fields between Molins de Rei and Cornellà. The rest has disappeared, although there are still some vestiges of its passage, such as the remains of the canalization attached to the wall of the Montjuïc cemetery, converted into a garden area.
The headquarters of the Canal de la Infanta has inside the appearance of a typical flat on the Rambla. Spacious, but with austere furniture. The meeting room stands out with a long table and some more rooms. In one of them, an old hype is preserved in which the shortlists of candidates to be part of the board were drawn, which were later put to a vote. Several portraits of the infanta also stand out. The jewel in the crown is a set of minute books and records distributed on two shelves that narrate two centuries of the canal’s history, as well as other archives where maps and other documents are kept. A single employee manages the day to day of the headquarters.
