2,000 years of history through heritage and landscapes
Strategic location
La Garriga is a town located in the Catalan pre-coastal depression, in the region of Vallès Oriental, at the foot of the pre-coastal mountain range that separates the metropolitan area of Barcelona from inland Catalonia. Therefore, the Garriga is in what has been called Barcelona's second metropolitan crown.
It is also a town located in a strategic location, at the entrance to the Congost pass, one of the natural routes between the coast and the Catalan interior, and the main one between Barcelona and Vic. And it is also a town well connected by road and train.
All these circumstances have led to an enormous urban development, which has multiplied tenfold, from 1,500 to 15,000, the population between the years 1900 and 2000. Despite this, however, aside from the legacy built within the urban core and the traces of the settlement ancient that archeology is slowly deciphering, the Garriga is still today surrounded by an interesting rural and natural environment, with an agroforestry landscape in the flatter areas that recalls that idyllic Vallès of Pere Quart and, at the same time, a wide mountainous area occupied mainly by forests.
The origins
But if its good location has led to great urban development in the last 150 years, it was also the cause of intense occupation of the area since ancient times. Remains of prehistoric occupation have been found, although little studied, although it is not until the Iberian period that the intensity of population in the area is more clearly documented. At that time, the territory that today occupies the Garriga was controlled from the towns of Puig del Castell, in Samalús, and Puiggraciós, in Montmany.
The Roman occupation brought this entire population down to the plain, which was intensively exploited. The Roman sites documented in the Garriga are very numerous, although few have been well studied. Undoubtedly, the most outstanding is the Roman Villa of Can Terrers, partially excavated and open to visitors. The villa represents the power of Rome in the Garriga: it was a large holding, located next to the road that joined Barcino (Barcelona) and Ausa (Vic), oriented towards production and trade with all empire, and which at the same time allowed the luxuries of the property, which even had hot baths in the style of the best terms.
Although we have little data from the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire, we know that the current territory of the Garriga continued to be intensively exploited, by smaller communities, who were mainly dedicated to livestock and agriculture (often semi-itinerant), and not so connected to distant territories.
The middle age
It is in the 10th century that we can begin to speak, now yes, of the Garriga. In 966, the parish church of La Doma is documented for the first time. And the territory he controlled, the parish, corresponds more or less to the current limits of the municipality. Surely the Church did nothing other than legally formalize the boundaries of the community that had previously lived in the area. It is the arrival of feudalism in the Garriga.
In any case, during the following centuries the population continued to be scattered, with small holdings and farmhouses dotting the territory. At most, small neighborhoods were created around some of the chapels, the most important of which, the neighborhood of Santa Maria del Camí.
It wasn't until the 14th century that a neighborhood of houses began to form around what is now Plaça de Santa Isabel. The houses were located at the limits of the road, very close to the god of thermal water, some early thermal baths and the chapel of Sant Joan and Sant Macari, now gone. Around this complex and always following the path of the rural road towards the north, what the documentation of the 15th century calls the "town of the baths" was formed.
The nucleus that ended up becoming the current Garriga grew in a northerly direction, in a more or less tortuous way, around the road, forming what the documentation calls "garriga street". A street always limited, to the west, by the monar canal, a medieval canal that crosses the whole municipality, from north to south, and which allowed to irrigate what, in the 19th century, was the most important garden area in Vallès. Where you could irrigate, you didn't build there.
At an urban level, in the 16th century, in case of need, the Garriga could function as an enclosed town, in which the houses acted as a wall and the two street ends were closed with two large gates. This growth towards the north culminated, between the 17th and 18th centuries, with the construction of the new parish church.
Although from the 17th century the opening of some other street began to be documented, such as the streets of Samalús and Cardedeu, in 1808 the Baron of Maldà still described the Garriga basically as an elongated street with the houses arranged on both sides of the road - which the baron himself describes as a road made of "rocks and stones", very messed up.
This rural road currently continues to structure the center of La Garriga, despite the fact that, from the end of the 19th century, the successive expansions and urbanizations have greatly extended the town's urban footprint.
This current urban stain is due to the changes that began to occur in the middle of the 19th century. At that time, the old rail road became a road. And in 1875 the train arrived in the town. This important improvement of the media and the means of communication, together with the fact that, since 1840, the Balneari Blancafort had been operating, were the decisive factors that drove the most momentous urban and socio-economic changes in the history of La Garriga.
Summer holidays and the urban transformation of La Garriga
The town became, from the arrival of the railway, a pole of attraction for the Barcelona bourgeoisie, who found it a calm and pleasant atmosphere to spend the summer. In 1876 the Balneari Blancafort reached 100 rooms, and by the end of the century up to six spa establishments were operating throughout the town. With the arrival of the train, the large bourgeois towers also began to be built. From the very beginning, on both sides of the train track, in the Ronda del Carril, and then throughout the summer area, which had its central axis in the Passeig. These large summer towers gradually formed a new urban landscape.
The expansion projects of the urban center at the end of the 19th century proposed unimaginable urban dimensions just a few years earlier. The Walk, started in 1878, responds to the will of the large properties in the southern sector of the Garriga (Can Nualart and Can Terrers) not to miss the opportunity to decant the great growth towards land they own urban planner of the town. The Promenade, therefore, surrounded by eclectic, modernist and noucentist towers, became a place of recreation, meeting and social relations for the summering colony.
The Ronda del Carril and the Passeig are the two main axes of summer town planning; the two great examples of the transformation of historic rural spaces into new urbanized spaces, of a bourgeois character, which respond to very different social and economic logics.
From the Civil War to the present day
The first stage of the summer vacation had an end and apart with the Civil War, which culminated in the deadly fascist bombing of the town, on January 29, 1939. The Garriga played a very important role during the conflict, with the confluence of a large number of refugees and displaced people, the presence of a military airfield and a war industry and becoming the regrouping point of the International Brigades, in the final stretch. At the urban level, however, it was only a temporary stoppage. After the war, the same logics that had already been imposed by the summer season and which were turning a small rural town into an industrial and service town remained in force. The town has been inexorably losing its best farmland to new urban and industrial areas.
The slow growth of the rural Garriga, until the 19th century, has given way to exponential urban development, during the 20th century and into the 21st century. The legacy left by the last 2,000 years of history, however, is, in the Garriga, of magnificent value and diversity. It is through this legacy that we can tell the story(s) of La Garriga and get to know the territory and the landscapes that surround us in depth.
