A Carriage Window to the Past
(Originally Published in Catalonia Today, June 2007)
Buried beneath a parking deck, behind an unassuming glass door which is always locked, there is a museum which serves more as a memorial to humble origins than as a public institution. On a busy day, the Museu De Carruatges Del Foment may have as many as 15 visitors; and on an average day it will probably have none. Yet its collection of 46 horse-drawn carriages is the largest in Catalonia. Funded by Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas, S.A. (FCC), the museum’s entire collection was once the property of Josep Piera, without whom the FCC would not exist.
In 1900, Piera founded the corporation Fomento de Obras y Construcciones, S.A. (FOCSA), which was controlled by the Piera family until it merged with Construcciones y Contratas, S.A. to form FCC in 1992. As Josep Piera’s fortunes grew, he became something of a whimsical collector of carriages. “Señor Piera, because he liked carriages and carts, kept buying them until eventually he had his own mini-museum,” says Juan Perez, Senior Custodian of the museum. “He didn’t really need them all, but he liked some of them for their design or aesthetic. Like this wine cart over here: Señor Piera saw it one day, decided he liked the design, and he bought it. That’s more or less how he accumulated most of what you see here.”
At the very beginning of the tour is the highway cart that Piera used to begin his career as a muleteer in 1875. It is a hulking beast of wicker and wood, with wheels as tall as a man, and could carry up to four tons of goods. Jose Molina, the assistant custodian, steps behind the barrier and gestures. “Take a look at this.” He runs his finger along a complex matrix of pulleys and rope. “This is the braking system. The last man alive who knew how to do this died a few years ago. If something were to happen, we wouldn’t know how to put it back together.”
The next part of the tour turns to carriages that were used in municipal contracts to clear rubble, carry ten-ton blocks of granite, for building the docks of Barcelona, and to clean the streets and sewers. “This one here was called a Parakeet Cart,” says Juan. “It carried a bird in a cage that they would lower into the sewers. If the bird came back dead, they knew they couldn’t go down.”
Today, FCC is an international, diversified corporation. It is the corporation which made a billionaire out of its principal shareholder, Esther Koplowitz, a Spanish noble and philanthropist who is also the wealthiest woman in Spain. The fact that this builder of public works around the world began as a local municipal contractor in 1900 –with an investment of five million pesetas and 150 horses—would be difficult to conceive if it weren’t for the existence of this museum.
The second half of the collection is an assortment of country and city taxis, omnibuses, hunting carriages –known as Dog Carts because of the ventilated boxes which held the hounds—and various luxury vehicles. Juan stops before an impressive black carriage with elegant curves and sucks air through his teeth. “This is the Landeau. It was the Rolls Royce of its epoch.” He moves around the carriage, opening and shutting doors and windows with the practiced facility of a professional coachman, pointing out the quality of the upholstery and woodwork, the oil lanterns and convertible roof. “This was the coach of royalty.”
With its whitewashed cinder-brick walls and overpowering scent of mothballs, the Museu De Carruatges, seems to be more of a storage facility than a museum. Since 1961 it has moved from its original location on Gran Via to San Andrés before settling into this relatively obscure location in the Vall d’Hebron neighbourhood. Indeed, in such a spartan setting, it taxes the imagination if one tries to visualize these perfectly preserved carriages in their natural environment. Yet, as a window to the past, it is there for the viewing. Es lo que hay, as the Spanish say. It is what there is.
Address: Plaza Josep Pallach, 8 (near Mundet Metro stop)
Phone: 93 427 5813 (open to the public by appointment only)