The old pharmacies of Barcelona: stained glass, carved wood and a gilded snake
Barcelona · Eixample and La Rambla · 1890s–1920
Of all the shops Barcelona fitted out in the Modernista style, pharmacies are the most numerous, according to a walking guide published by the city: 63 opened, and 24 keep the decoration of their time. In the city’s catalogue of protected shops, the establiments emblemàtics, they are the largest group too: thirty-nine names on it contain the word farmàcia. The six in these photographs are working pharmacies. A box of plasters is paid for under a carved Gothic vault, or beneath a stained-glass orange tree.
Farmàcia Sanchís, Rambla de Catalunya 117: the apse behind the counter, 1900. Farmàcia Bolós: the wrought-iron sign and the orange tree in the glass above the entrance. Through the etched glass of Farmàcia Puigoriol: labelled jars, a mortar, scales.
The city’s guide tells of two histories meeting. Pharmacy in Catalonia became a profession of regulated study: colleges of pharmacy from 1804, the first official courses in 1815, a faculty at the University of Barcelona from 1845. Modernisme, in the guide’s words, was an urban and bourgeois style, bound up with architecture and the decorative arts. The pharmacists behind these six shops hired architects and master builders, cabinetmakers, glaziers and painters, and a pharmacy was designed as a whole, from the shopfront to the lamps. The architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed one too, for Dr Duran España on Carrer de València, in 1896; its cabinetwork survives. Most of the plants carved, painted and set in glass in these shops were medicinal: poppy, laurel, rose, buttercup, chamomile. The emblem of the trade is the snake coiled around Hygieia’s cup.
The oldest date belongs to the former Farmàcia Padrell, on Carrer de Sant Pere Més Baix. An oval over its door gives the year of founding as 1561; the city’s guide tells its early moves as oral tradition. Its Modernista front came in 1894, with narcissi, gladioli, lilies and roses in the glass, and the iron lamp inside took a first prize for design at the Exposition of 1929.
The snake is on the door of Farmàcia Sanchís, at Rambla de Catalunya 117: a handle of
gilded metal that the city’s record describes as a serpent “in an aggressive attitude”. The pharmacy opened in 1900 for Dr Frederic Vallet Xiró, in what was then called a “modernised Gothic style”, under the master builder José Pérez Terraza. Gothic arches are carved into the lower panels of the doors. Inside, the cabinets rise in pointed tracery, and behind the counter they curve into an apse under a vault of radiating ribs, still in its first dark brown lined with gold. A cast-iron pillar of the building’s frame stands in front of it. Above the cabinets runs a painted canvas, so darkened that its garlands and the bust of a pharmacist are hard to make out. The rest of the woodwork was once as dark as the pillar; it has since been stripped and varnished.
A few blocks down the same street, on the corner of València, Farmàcia Bolós opened on 11 January 1902. Its founder, the pharmacist Antoni Novellas i Roig, gave the design to friends: the architect Antoni de Falguera and his brother, the Falguera brothers who also designed Casa Sans, now Hotel Diana, in Tossa de Mar. They drew a dispensary with large stained-glass windows, shelving and gas lighting. The glass above the entrance holds an orange tree heavy with fruit, and a study of the shop’s decoration counts twenty-one plants in it, from bitter orange and iris to hops and poppy. In 1906 part of the shop was given over to homeopathy. The side door still reads Secció Homeopàtica, and inside, a painted banner says in Latin that like is cured by like.
In 1927 Novellas sold the pharmacy to Antoni de Bolós, of a family of pharmacists from Olot; it passed to his son and then to his grandson. When the building needed all its floors and ceilings replaced in 1995, the grandson had the cabinets taken down, restored in a workshop and put back. The tiled floor was relaid as a copy of the original. The ceiling paintings could not be saved; tracings were made of the lower part of the vault and set on the new ceiling.
Farmàcia Puigoriol, on the corner of Mallorca and Girona, opened in 1913 for Andreu Puigoriol i Botey. Its decoration is attributed to the builder Marià Pau; Pere Anglès designed the furniture, Francesc Torres made the oak joinery and the Nogués brothers the marble plinth. The bevelled glass of the doors, etched with acid and set with stones of coloured glass, was Czech. The front is framed in panels of glass painted green from behind, with gold letters bent to the curve of the arches. On the corner they keep their original words, FARMACIA and PUIGORIOL. On the side, LABORATORIO has been replaced by ESPECIFICOS.
That one word holds a change in the trade. In the nineteenth century a pharmacist made up medicines to doctors’ prescriptions. Específicos were made in factories and sold in boxes and bottles under their own names, with a label for use and dose and a composition kept wholly or partly secret: that is how Spain’s health council defined them for the stamp tax of 1892. By the Catalan pharmacists’ own figures, seventy per cent of what Spanish pharmacies sold in 1893 was made abroad, most of it in France. At Puigoriol the older order is still behind the glass: oak cabinets with glass jars, a mortar and scales, gas lamps in the arch to the back room, and an illuminated sign for MAGNESIA EFERVESCENTE. Only the flowers painted on the ceiling were lost, in a repair after a water leak. The pharmacy passed to the founder’s son-in-law and, in the 1980s, to the founder’s granddaughter.
At Bruc 88 the pharmacy was opened in the 1890s by a family from Uruguay who had kept one in Montevideo. Its furniture was made of wood brought from Uruguay, and on the counter stood ceramic jars with the arms of Uruguay and Spain combined. Before 1908 the shop passed to Francisco Vivas Madrenys, who had the entrance made; his name is still etched in the glass above the door. Inside hangs a cast lamp in the shape of a dragon, and a window in the old back room shows Hygieia’s cup and the red cross in wreaths of laurel. When the counter was moved back to make the shop larger, the floor kept the mark of where it had stood.
Not every old pharmacy is Modernista. Farmàcia Nadal, on La Rambla at the corner of Carrer de Bonsuccés, was designed around 1918–1920 by the architect Ramon Puig i Gairalt for Dr Rosendo Masó Arumí, in Noucentisme, the style that came after Modernisme. Its doorways are framed in red lustre tiles with white letters and a green ceramic braid; the side panels hold jars of medicinal plants, and the plinth is of green hexagonal tiles, like a honeycomb. An iron canopy names the trade in four languages, Apotheker and Pharmacien among them. By 1931 the pharmacy carried the name of its new owner, Nadal, and the tiles hold both: FARMACIA NADAL, and below, Antiga Dr. Masó Arumí, formerly Dr Masó Arumí’s. The catalogue protects the front; nothing inside.
A catalogue also records what has gone. At Diputació 331, on the corner of Girona, Salvador Tayà Filella opened a pharmacy before 1906, with doors and furniture in the Modernista style. A study of 1990 called it a “living example” of popular Modernisme; another, in 2006, described cabinetwork the colour of honey. A few years later the shop was refitted, and the Modernista floor and furniture were taken out. What the city protects at that address is the doorway: wavy mouldings, leaves carved in low relief, and the word farmàcia etched in joined letters on the glass of the door.
Diputació 331: the doorway of the former Tayà pharmacy, which the city protects. Carved wooden pharmacy door with wavy frames and ‘Farmàcia’ etched in script on the glass, Barcelona
A catalogue can keep a door, a sign, a pane of etched glass. What keeps the cabinets and the jars in use is the trade behind them: as long as prescriptions are handed across the counter, a pharmacy is still the place it was built to be.
Sources: Ajuntament de Barcelona: Portal d’Informació Urbanística, catalogue records and record sheets of the establiments emblemàtics; El mosaic del meu barri, Itinerari 1: Mosaics a farmàcies modernistes del Casc Antic; R. Rodríguez Nozal, Anales de la Real Academia Nacional de Farmacia, 2021; Viquipèdia: Farmàcia Bolós, Farmàcia Puigoriol. Photographs: MYT’.
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