Flying the Empress of Honolulu - a Catalan family in 1960s Canada

In late October 1960 the Empress of Honolulu flew my family and I across the Atlantic. I was not quite four-years old and it was my first time flying. The Empress of Honolulu was a DC-6B piston-engine airliner of Canadian Pacific Airlines and it was from her cabin that I had my first glimpse of Canada. That was during a stopover in Gander, Newfoundland, to refuel because the Empress lacked the range of the newer jetliners. It was grey and snowing as I looked out through the cabin port and I could see men in parkas working around the aircraft. It looked so very bleak, cold and so foreign. Too young at the time to fully appreciate the purpose of our trip, I did wonder what we were doing in Gander. Now, so many years later, I try to imagine my parent’s thoughts and feelings at that moment. They must have been very anxious as they looked out into what seemed like an abyss. The day before in Barcelona a group of family and friends had seen us off before taking the train for Madrid, and there to board the Empress. Having made the decision to emigrate and leave Spain my parents knew they were unlikely to ever again see those people. That first glimpse of Canada already in the grip of winter could not have put them at ease. It must have been stressful and emotional. For my mother even more so as she was pregnant with her third child. It had been a difficult decision but my parents felt that Spain with its limited prospects had no future for them or their children.

My parents had been raised and schooled in Catalonia in the years before and during the Spanish Civil War. They had suffered in the war but no more or no less than most. My father, who was from Igualada, had been too young to serve in the Republican army during the war but did work with his father, a mechanic for the army. After the Fascist victory my father was conscripted into the Infanteria de Marina and was then sent to Mallorca. He was present in September 1943 when part of the Italian fleet escaping the Germans sailed into Palma. After his military service he worked at various jobs while studying to be an architectural draftsman. My mother's family had an estanc, or tobacconist’s, on Carrer de Urgell in Manresa. During the war the searches of the family home looking for hidden relatives or religious imagery caused her much anguish. She barely survived an aerial bombardment when a wall nearly fell on her. After the war my mother helped to look after her own ailing mother while working in the estanc. My parents met in the early-1950s and after their wedding in 1956 they settled in Manresa. Neither was happy with their lot and at some point they decided to emigrate. At first they hoped to go to Australia but could not afford the expense. Coincidentally, at about that time Canada agreed to accept a small number of Spanish emigrants. My parents applied and were accepted but it must have been an act of desperation as they knew little about Canada.

If they even thought about it, Canada was a land of misconceptions in the minds of most Europeans, my parents included. My father once told me that his image of Canada before emigrating was based on the 1936 Hollywood musical Rose Marie. In that film Canada was depicted as a country of a few towns surrounded by immense forests and populated by singing bar girls, lumberjacks, Indians and scarlet-jacketed Mounties. The reality was somewhat different. In the years after the second world war Canada's economy was booming. The war saved Canada from the ravages of the Great Depression. Despite having a population of only 11 million in 1939 about one million men and women served in its armed forces. Canadians were proud of their role in the world war. Canada had profited by the establishment of new industries that had supported the war effort. After the peace returning veterans could look forward to civilian life with plenty of jobs to go around. So many jobs in fact that Canada needed immigrants to work in the oil fields of Alberta, build roads and dams in British Columbia and Quebec, manufacture cars in Ontario and harvest wheat in Saskatchewan. For war-weary Europeans, Canada seemed like the promised land with its peace, security and the prospect of employment. In the 20 years after the end of the war almost three million immigrants were accepted by Canada. It was a time of optimism and confidence in a future that seemed very bright. The contrast with the Spain of the 1950s could hardly have been greater. Twenty years after the Civil War, the mood in Spain was sombre with shortages of goods and food, and high unemployment. The economic situation was so dire that the Spanish government encouraged emigration. Spain remained under the control of one of the last fascist dictatorships that had blighted Europe and had become a pariah amongst western nations. Life for minority groups within Spain was even tougher. The languages and cultures of the Catalans and Basques were aggressively repressed by the Franco dictatorship.

Soon after we arrived in Montreal my father found work as a draftsman in an architectural office. A few days before the Christmas holidays the company’s owner and secretary absconded with the payroll. The holidays looked to be very bleak. However, on Christmas Eve we had a visit from a pair of representatives from a charity organization. Someone had alerted the charity that a family of recent immigrants had just lost their only means of support. Groceries, some toys and twenty dollars in cash were left. My parents were taken aback by the gifts. On New Years Day a police car rushed my mother to hospital where her second daughter was born. After the holidays my father used the cash from the charity to pay for bus fare and look for another job. He soon found one. A previous employee of the firm, another Spanish immigrant, had made such a positive impression that my father was hired partly because he too was from Spain. That anonymous Spaniard became part of family lore. So after a hectic start to life in Canada and the experience of a Montreal winter the new year turned out to be more settled and positive.

In 1960, Montreal was still Canada's largest city and retained its status as the country's economic and cultural centre. A Catalan could not avoid comparing the cities of Montreal and Barcelona as the two are in some ways similar. Both are bilingual cities surrounded by hinterlands that are almost uni-lingual. Throughout the post-war period both cities attracted immigrants, Montreal from all over Europe, Barcelona from southern Spain. However, there were significant differences between the two cities. Barcelona was under siege by a dictatorship that asphyxiated Catalans and their language. Simply speaking Catalan in public could get you in trouble with the authorities. The Spanish government encouraged Andalusian emigration to Barcelona partly for valid economic reasons but also in a perverse attempt to drown Catalan culture. In Montreal, French and English were spoken everywhere and the casual visitor would have thought that the two were on equal footings, but in fact there were tensions between the “two solitudes.” Montreal was still the centre of corporate Canada but that was an almost wholly Anglo bastion. Even in the small towns throughout Quebec, where the population was almost entirely Francophone, if there were major industries the "bosses" were usually English-Canadians or Americans. The lack of economic and political power was a source of resentment among Quebecers. Just after the second world war French-Canadian society began to react against the dominance of English-Canadian society and the stifling influence of the Catholic Church. This development, which eventually became known as “la Révolution Tranquille,” slowly gained momentum but it moved inexorably and reached a head during the 1960s. The objective of this “revolution” was exemplified by the slogan "maitres chez nous."

My parents considered it important that our family adapt to Canadian life, as far as they were concerned they were there to stay. It helped that my mother had some school French but both my parents eventually learned Montreal’s two languages. Certainly, knowing Catalan helped with the French--the two languages have many similarities. Although my parents made a commitment to their new country but that did not mean discarding their Catalan identity. At home because my parents spoke Catalan my sisters and I learned to speak it. Castilian was never spoken. Unfortunately, even though my sisters and I could speak Catalan we could not read it. Our identity as Catalans was almost totally dependant on the spoken language and we had little opportunity to speak it outside of home. We knew a small number Catalan families in Montreal but we saw them only occasionally. My parents loved books and we had hundreds at home in four languages but only a couple of dozen or so were in Catalan, among them a set of Mervalles de Catalunya. A trans-Atlantic telephone call to family in Catalonia was a rare and expensive event. There were letters from family and friends but I could not read them. Those letters could just as well have been from strangers so little did I know of the people writing them. For my sisters and me our knowledge of Catalan culture and history was dependant on what our parents told us. We grew up hearing about Catalonia's struggle to maintain its identity, stories of the civil war and my parents’ interpretation of those events. From them we learned snippets of family lore--one of my grandfathers had been an anarchist, another a guardia civil and a third had been a founding member of the Igualada Football Club. On my mother's side there were relatives who were farmers and others industrialists.

Our connections with Catalonia were tenuous and it was mainly through my aunt, my mother's sister, that kept us informed of events “back home." In addition to my aunt’s letters, she would occasionally mail us packages of Spanish newspapers and magazines. The Canadian media rarely carried Spanish news. Sometime in 1963 we were surprised when, in addition to the newspapers and magazines, my aunt sent several records. Those records were quite a novelty because they were in Catalan--the Spanish government's restrictions on Catalan had extended even to recordings. The recordings were a varied lot, children’s stories, non-political comedy, and several music records. The image on the cover of one of the music records made a lasting impression on me--a young man leaning against a brick wall and holding a guitar with a little boy in the background looking up at him. Of course the record was Raimon's EP featuring his iconic Al Vent. Raimon’s Dylan-esque message of freedom was unlikely to be understood by a seven-year old boy living in Canada but my parents understood--perhaps Raimon was inspired by Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind. Growing up in Canada I was under the influence of Anglo-American culture. I can vividly remember the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and the broadcast direct from New York City in February 1964. It was a Sunday night and the three or four Catalan families that had gathered together for supper watched the show on a black and white TV.

When we arrived in Canada I was too young to start school but I began to learn French because our neighbourhood was mostly French-speaking. When I was old enough for school my parents had three choices. They could send me to a Catholic French school, a Protestant English school or a Catholic English school--all publicly supported schools. For a couple of reasons they chose the Catholic school where they spoke English. First, we were nominally a Catholic family and for my mother religion was important. My father could compromise on this issue, in Canada he would even attend Christmas and Easter masses, but he had strong anticlerical tendencies that had been keenly developed in Spain. The choice of English was a little more calculating. There was little doubt that most of the political and economic power was in anglophone hands and it made sense to tie your future with that group. Most immigrants made the same choice. And so, as I started school I had to learn another language.

In 1964 my parents bought a house in a new subdivision in Pierrefonds in West Island Montreal. For a young boy it was a great place to grow up in. At that time the subdivision was surrounded by woodlots and farms with the fields marked out by ancient field-stone walls. Just down the street there was a big farm field which in the spring the farmer ploughed with a horse. The poor horse worked two weeks every year and then spent the rest of the year as picturesque field ornament sometimes pestered by my friends and I. The farmer grew cash crops and my mother would buy vegetables from his roadside stand. In the winter another part of the farmer’s property had a pond that would freeze over. Montreal winters were cold and there was always lots of snow. The neighbourhood kids would clear the snow from the pond so that we could skate and play ice hockey. Of course, we followed the fortunes of "les Canadiens," Quebec’s hockey team--in the same way that FC Barcelona is Catalonia’s football team--and in those days the Habs seemed to always win. In the woodlots--they are all gone now--climbing trees and playing in the woods was standard deportment for my friends and I. In the winter with all of the snow we built elaborate snow forts.

One day in 1965, the whole family, dressed in our Sunday best, drove our second-hand 1959 Pontiac downtown to a government building. Before a judge my parents repeated a pledge and we were each given a document affirming that we were citizens of Canada. We were no longer “Spanish.” For my parents their break with their country of birth was legally complete. It would have been an emotional moment for them because, by then, they felt really at home in Canada. As an immigrant family we were part of a third reality of Canadian society that would eventually lead to the concept of multi-culturalism. Even though we were outsiders we had been welcomed and accepted. My parents were grateful for that. By then we were a typical middle-class family, we just happened to speak Catalan at home. In Pierrefonds our next door neighbours on one side were Filipinos, who also spoke Spanish, on the other side was an Anglo-Canadian couple. Other neighbours included French-Canadians, English, Germans, Italians and blacks from the Caribbean. There were Catholics, Protestants and Jews.

In 1967 Canada celebrated its centennial since confederation. There was a mood of optimism and celebration throughout the country. At first the tensions between English-Canada and French-Canada seemed to be forgotten during that happy year. Every town had its "centennial project" whether it was building a new public arena, a new park or organizing some special event. The largest event was in Montreal where all summer the city hosted Expo '67 a spectacular world's fair. (I was disappointed that Spain did not have pavilion.) Canadians, and many foreigners, made the trip to Montreal to visit Expo. I went to the fair several times either on school outings or with my family. It was very exciting for a ten-year. However, when the centennial celebrations came to an end there was a sense that something was amiss. It was a mood that, even if I could not understand it being so young, that I later learned extended into the politics of the country as a whole. During the summer the visiting French president de Gaulle acerbated the political situation when he blurted out “vive le Quebec libre.” De Gaulle managed to at once inflame separatists and offend Canadians who recalled all their war dead buried in France. The tension in Canada grew and in Quebec the Quiet Revolution became louder and louder.

The following year was, in my opinion, pivotal in the eventual resolution of the tension between the “two solitudes.” That year Pierre Trudeau, an intense French-Canadian intellectual, was elected Prime Minister of Canada. A passionate federalist and perfectly bilingual, Trudeau believed that Quebec’s interests were best served as part of a truly bilingual Canada. Trudeau went to Ottawa as head of a group of like-minded Quebec politicians, some of whom could not speak English. The problem was that while the federalists envisioned a Canada that was truly bi-lingual from sea to sea, in reality the country was far from it. Pitted against Trudeau’s so-called “wise men” was a strongly nationalistic Quebec provincial government. One of the provincial ministers, a fiery ex-journalist René Lévesque, quit to form his own party, the separatist Parti Québécois. This set the Canadian political stage for the next decade. In a way it was a race between the two groups. The federalists racing to legislate and promote real bilingualism while the PQ attempted to convince “le Québécois” of the benefits of independence. As Catalans we could empathise with the aspirations of the French-Canadian minority but we also admired the democratic nature of Canada. To those who had experienced Europe’s wars and upheavals, like my parents, the other Catalans in Canada and the other European immigrants, the hint of political violence was unsettling.

Starting in 1963 there were a number of violent incidents that underlined the social and cultural conflicts brewing in Montreal, and in Quebec. Most of the incidents were relatively minor. A shadowy left-wing group called le Front de libération du Québec had placed small bombs in mailboxes and office buildings. Other incidents were more serious, for example, the rioting that normally accompanied the St Jean Baptist Day celebrations in Montreal. One of the most violent incidents was the October 1969 burning of a bus garage and the subsequent rioting that resulted in two deaths and millions of dollars worth of damage. The garage was located in downtown Montreal near my father's office. When he got home that night he seemed upset and disturbed by what he had seen. My parents discussed what was going on. And, I think, that they compared that and other events with what they had seen, albeit on a greater scale, thirty years earlier in Spain. They talked about moving from Montreal. A few weeks later my father made some trips to Ottawa and Toronto looking for another job. In early December we boarded the train to Toronto. We moved from “French-Canada” to “English-Canada” and in a sense we had once again emigrated.

The differences between Montreal and Toronto were dramatic on several levels linguistically, culturally, politically and even climatically. On Toronto streets you were more likely to hear Italian, Polish or any of a dozen other languages before you heard French. Toronto winters were insipid compared to Montreal’s. It was a great disappointment for me to leave Pierrefonds, it had been a wonderful place to grow up. For me the move to Toronto was almost traumatic. We went from living in a Pierrefonds that was still very rural in aspect to living in Parkdale, a tough downtown Toronto neighbourhood. By the time we left for Toronto several other Catalan families that we knew had proceeded us. Toronto was also full of anglophones who had recently quit Montreal.

The climax of the FLQ's bid for violent revolution and Quebec independence came in October 1970. A Quebec government minister and a British diplomat were kidnapped by separate FLQ cells. After a few days the minister was killed. It was an intense shock to a country where the only previous political assassination had occurred in 1868. Fortunately, the Englishman was released unharmed and his captors allowed to leave for Cuba. The extent of the FLQ’s operations were unknown and so the federal government, under Trudeau’s direction, took a controversial hard line and suspended civil liberties. Although there was concern about the government's imposition of war-time laws most Canadians, including many Quebecers, supported Trudeau. However, Quebecers were shocked by both the violence of the FLQ and by the Canadian government's response. Canadians were not accustomed to see soldiers with machine guns patrolling their streets--that was something that only happened in other countries. The “October Crisis” precipitated unforeseen reactions. On the one hand Quebecers, both federalists and separatists, firmly rejected violence as a means to an end. On the other hand Quebec separatists were more determined than ever to use the ballot box to meet their goals.

From Toronto we watched these developments with trepidation, anxiety and, after some time, relief. A few years later, in 1980, a separatist Quebec government under Lévesque put the question of separatism to a referendum and it was rejected. During the decade that started in about 1965 the uncertainty of the the political situation in Quebec, along with the assertion by Quebecers of their economic and cultural rights caused many anglophone Canadians to feel uncomfortable in the province and many of them left. Among those anglophones who left Montreal for Toronto was my wife’s family. Many of the big corporations moved their headquarters from Montreal to Toronto. As a result Toronto became the principal city in Canada especially in economic matters. It is a position it retains to this day but is now being challenged by cities in western Canada. In hindsight perhaps my parents, and all those others, overreacted to the events in Quebec. Perhaps more anglophones should have learned a of bit of French. At the time the unrest seemed very familiar to people who had experienced other civil conflicts.

My parents made a good choice in Canada. As country it has its problems and its own weaknesses but it inherited a strong parliamentary system and a tradition of respect for the rule of law. Its founding was based on compromise between mostly Protestant English-speakers and mostly Catholic French-speakers. In times of trouble the tradition of compromise has served Canada and its people well. That tradition helped when Canadians chose to embrace both multi-culturalism and bilingualism. It is a route that implies understanding and respect for those who are of a different race, religion, culture or speak a different language. The choice was made using open debate, the ballot box and in two official languages.

I often think of that day in October 1960 while the Empress of Honolulu waited patiently as the ground crew looked after her in Gander. I remember the gloom as I looked out through the port at the windswept snow and the gray sky in the half-light. In the end it turned out alright and the Empress was looking after a small boy and his family. Not long after we arrived in Canada my father--my parents both prided themselves as an amateur artists--painted a portrait of the Empress of Honolulu. Using a postcard as a model for his watercolour, the portrait depicted the Empress in flight with the sun glinting off her fuselage and engine nacelles. For many years the painting was stored in my father’s portfolio and it was a long time before I had it framed. Of my parents' paintings it is my favourite because of the memories it invokes. Other immigrants recall the ships they sailed on when they travelled from the old world to the new world, but I remember flying the Empress of Honolulu.

(This post is a reworking of an article I wrote for the Catalan-language magazine L'Avenç. That article was somewhat shorter and, of course, was directed to Catalan speakers.)

The Empress of Honolulu was a Douglas DC-6B (c/n 45328) and bore the registration CF-CZU with fleet number 443. The aircraft entered service with Canadian Pacific Airlines in July 1957 and remained property of that airline until September 1970. In 1969, while still owned by CPA, the aircraft was leased through Concare Aircraft Leasing Corp. to Pacific Western Airlines under the registration N55CA. The aircraft was converted to DC-6BF configuration prior to being sold to F.A. Connor in 1970. Under American registry she retained the N55CA. Presumably, like other DC-6s, she was used to fly cargo in Florida, the Bahamas and the Caribbean area. The photograph above was taken by Mr. Ruud Leeuw in February 1999 while N55CA, the former Empress of Honolulu, was in the process of being scrapped at Opa Locka airport near Miami, Florida. It was not a very dignified end for a fine aircraft--when the photograph was taken most of the fuselage had been removed, the engines had been dismounted, the wings torn off and the nose was propped up with a forklift. The photograph is used with Mr. Leeuw's permission. The photograph at the head of the article is an old Canadian Pacific Airlines publicity image and it not of CF-CZU but of one of her sister ships. My father's painting of the Empress of Honolulu is in storage in Canada and I do not have access to it at this time.

A Castle in Spain

Vilassar castle in the early 1900s from an old postcard.

Those who indulge in absentminded daydreaming are sometimes accused of dreaming of castles in Spain. I do not know why daydreamers would favour Spanish castles over, say, Scottish castles. Of course the weather is better in Spain. Perhaps it is a matter of numbers and the expression arose because there are so many castles in Spain and thus there are more of them to dream about. When we had the opportunity to move to Spain a few years ago I certainly was not thinking, or dreaming, of castles but perhaps my wife was. I should ask her if she was absentmindedly daydreaming. In any case it was by chance that we found ourselves in Vilassar de Dalt living next door to one of the oldest and best preserved castles in Catalonia or Spain for that matter.

Vilassar de Dalt is a small town tucked into a fold of the Serrelada Litoral, a low range of mountains stretching northeast along the Catalan coast from Barcelona. Until I had the offer of a job in the town I had never heard of it. When we left for Spain we still knew very little about the town. Would Vilassar be a friendly town? Would we like living there? Could we find a place to live?

Arriving at Barcelona’s airport on a day in September, tired from the overnight flight, we were overwhelmed by the Mediterranean heat and light. As the taxi drove us from the airport through Barcelona and past the sprawling harbour we wondered just where we would end up. Once on the other side of Barcelona the highway cuts across Badalona, Catalonia’s third city in terms of population but perhaps its most dismal example of urban planning. The apartment towers, decorated with drying laundry, crowding the highway filled each of us with dread. What if we ended up living in one of those places? We were all relieved to leave Badalona behind. Eventually the taxi left the highway and started climbing the lower slopes of the Serralada. Vilassar turned out to be a surprise, a pleasant surprise.

The oldest part of Vilassar is characterised by narrow and steep streets. The centre of the town is the Placa de la Adjuntament, three kilometres from the sea, where the town hall and the church face each other. The old town coincides with the abrupt change in slope between the coastal plain and the steeper flanks of the mountain itself. Vilassar is separated from the sea by the highway, a strip of agricultural land and along the coast a strip of urbanization that runs continuously from Barcelona to Mataro.

Our arrival was a few days before Catalonia’s national holiday and so after I had presented myself at my new employer’s premises we had a four-day long weekend to settle in. We found a room at a local pension in the old part of town, basic but comfortable and clean. The following day we set out to explore the town with the objective of finding an apartment as quickly as possible.

At the first real estate office we asked, the agent was not encouraging; she had no rentals but suggested we try another agent. Although it was only ten o´clock in the morning it was already hot and as the four of us trudged up the steep streets of Vilassar we wondered at our prospects. The office of the second estate agent was just uphill from the church. A young man of about thirty let us in and we presented our case. We had just arrived in Spain, I had a job in Vilassar and we needed, we wanted an apartment in town, preferably in the old part. Our hopes lowered when Jordi, the young man, warned us that there were normally few rentals in the centre of Vilassar but that he had one listing.

The apartment was not more than fifty steps from Jordi’s office up a side street. The three-bedroom apartment was on the third floor. Despite Jordi’s warning it was a comfortable apartment. What sold me was the view of the Mediterranean from the living room window. There was a balcony that ran the width of the living room and the adjacent bedroom. The other two bedrooms and the kitchen faced a sort of courtyard at the rear that was shared with several other buildings. And, the apartment had access to the terrace on the next floor up. The view from the terrace was even better. One could look out over the roofs of the lower town and in the distance take in a wide sweep of the sea. Close by in the foreground stood the bell tower and steeple of the church. The view was framed on either side by outlying ridges of the Serralada.

The view in the opposite direction from the sea was not as interesting. Standing over the various bits of the nearest buildings was a quartet of disused water tanks and beyond a line of cypress trees. The closely spaced trees effectively blocked the view toward the mountain. I asked Jordi what was behind the trees. He reacted as if I should know. “It’s the castle of the Marques,” Jordi said. My surprise was complete. “A castle, really?” That settled it; we took take the apartment and we had not even seen the castle.

It was a couple of days before we had a proper look at Vilassar´s castle, or rather caught some glimpses of it. From the narrow streets of the town it is impossible to see anything more than its upper parts. Vilassar castle is not large but its picture prefect aspect conjures images of brave knights jousting and chivalrous deeds done. A little research into its history soon dispells such thoughts. During its almost thousand years of existence nothing much has happened around the castle. Unlike other parts of Spain the Muslim occupation of Catalonia was relatively short and in the immediate environs of Vilassar it was even briefer. Vilassar castle never suffered a great siege. The most martial function of castle occurred after the 16th century when Muslim pirates roamed the Catalan coast and its towers served as maritime lookouts. While nearby coastal towns suffered pirate raids the castle itself remained untouched.

Vilassar castle origins are obscure but already in the 10th century a cylindrical watch tower and some adjacent structures coinciding with the present building were in place. Judging from the location of the castle, on a sort of ridge between two intermittent watercourses, there were likely previous structures, perhaps a Visigoth castle or a Roman villa, on the same site as the castle. Late in the 13th century a square tower was added. It was about this time when the function of Vilassar castle changed from that of a fortress to a palace.

The castle was originally in the hands of the Sant Vincenc family, lords of Burriac the fuedal masters of this area of the Maresme. Vilassar castle and Burriac castle in nearby Cabera de Mar were both held by the Sant Vincenc family. Burriac castle is now a picturesque ruin. The death of Berenguer de Sant Vincenc in 1352 without an heir led to the sale of the castle to Pere des Bosc family. In the 15th century the castle passed into hands of the crown even though the des Bosc family continued to live there until the 18th century when the family seems to disappear. In 1704 Vilassar castle passed to marques de Moia de la Torre family.

The castle acquired, more or less, its present appearance during the 14th and 15th centuries under the des Boscs. The appearance of Vilassar castle, more palace than fortress, saved it from destruction during the reign of Philip V. Since the 19th century the castle has been the property of the Marques de Santa Maria Barbera i la Maresana. In the 1930s Vilassar castle was designated a national monument and the current Marques continues to receive public funds to maintain it. The castle is more than an architectural treasure as it also houses valuable archives. The archives consist of manuscript collections of several aristocratic Catalan and Spanish families. Some of the documents date from the 11th century according to a group of conservators from the University of Texas. Some of the archives relate to the Catalan mystic, writer and thinker Ramon Llull.

Despite the significance of the castle and its archives and the public funds that maintain both, the castle remains the private residence of the Marques and his family. This situation does not please the locals, few of whom have ever even been inside the enclosing wall much less entered the castle itself. Later when we got to know the mayor I asked if he had ever been inside--once many years before he said. The marques does maintain the castle and its important archives. He has not turned it into a carnival attraction or into a parador and that is something to be commended.

The best views of the castle and the grounds surrounding it are from the mountains around Vilassar. A favourite view of it is from a slope just to the east of the castle overlooking some vineyards. The castle grounds also include three or four acres of vineyards. The grapes are sent to the nearby town of Alella to be used for making wine of the smallest DOs (Denominacio d´Origen) in Spain.

The castle broods over Vilassar especially at night. The perimeter wall around the castle grounds crowds the narrow streets. In the evenings when I walk the dog and the wind blows off the mountain rustling the almond trees and bougainvillea overhanging the castle’s walls spirits seem to be about. Sometimes there is the scent of honey suckle. Bats flint about in the pools of light round the street lamps. From a certain spot on the street next to the perimeter wall the upper part of the castle is visible including a window high up on the wall. Usually the window is dark but sometimes there is a light signalling that someone is home. As we stroll past the main gate the marques’ dogs bark at my dog. Some nights the sound of an owl on the castle grounds drifts through our open bedroom window. We may never see the inside of it but it is our castle in Spain.

The Casa de Cos—19th Century Catalan Row Housing

An example of a Casa de Cos, Vilassar de Mar

We had been living in Vilassar de Dalt for some time before we decided to buy a house in town. In the last four decades Vilassar´s population has increased dramatically as it is within easy commuting distance of Barcelona. Although it has been afflicted by urban sprawl, the town retains a well defined centre with narrow winding streets and close packed houses. We had decided early on that if we were to buy it would have to be in that old quarter which still retains its village character. Over a period of months my wife had been browsing the advertisements in the estate agents´ windows looking for something we could afford. Eventually she spotted a house that had the right combination of necessary restoration and price. We visited the house several times, and honestly it was a mess, but eventually we talked ourselves into its possibilities. After closer examination we concluded that the asking price was too high for the amount of work it was going to need. And so, when our offer was rejected we decided to wait and see what would happen. Our timing was right as the Spanish housing bubble had collapsed and forced down prices. Accordingly, a few weeks later the asking price was reduced and we made another offer. We and the sellers agreed on the terms and we found ourselves owners of a property in Spain.

The house is on one of Vilassar´s oldest streets but unusually the part of the street in front is at least three times wider than is normal in the old town. There is a good reason for that but it was some time before we found out why. Our neighbour to the north is the marquis de Santa Maria de Barberà i de la Manresana who lives in Vilassar’s most imposing private residence, a thousand-year old castle. Depending on who we talked to, our more modest home is between a hundred and two hundred years old. Like most of the houses in the old part of the town the front façade is built directly to the property line on the street. There is a small courtyard (eixeda in Catalan) between the back of the house and the retaining wall that separates us from the castle grounds. Soon after buying the house we learned that it is a typical example of what in Catalonia is called a Casa de Cos—sometimes also known as a Casa d’un Cos. Groups of near identical Casas de Cos were built in rows along urban streets throughout Catalonia. They are particularly prevalent in the Maresme comarca, or county, north-east of Barcelona. The Casa de Cos first appeared in the 18th century, was built in considerable numbers throughout the 19th century and new examples continued to be built during the first three decades of the 20th century. During all that time the basic layout hardly varied. The prevalence of the Casa de Cos is tied to the industrialization of Catalonia, specifically the growth of the textile industry. I find it intriguing that the Casa de Cos is so common and that it was built with so little variation in many places throughout Catalonia. Of course, row houses—lines of identical units built shoulder to shoulder—are not unique to Catalonia but it is perhaps interesting to examine this type of structure using our Vilassar house as a basis.

A Casa de Cos in Premia de Mar, dated 1823

The typical Casa de Cos was built to a very specific layout; the stairs so placed so as to divide the ground floor into two more or less equal areas in the front of the house and the back. A hallway runs from the front entrance clear back to the door opening out to the rear courtyard. The layout of the second floor is similar to that of the ground floor. The front facade was also strictly defined so that on the ground floor the entrance was set to one side and a window centred on the remaining space. There was a single window on the second floor centred on the entrance doors below. There could of course be variations in the details. Sometimes the ground floor window was eliminated leaving only the doors as an opening. The second floor opening would possibly be extended down to create instead a small balcony. There were also variations in decor and finishes. For example, some Casas de Cos had finely finished stone work for the lintels and jambs of the windows and doors, but most had painted stucco covering plain brick work. These were houses that were meant to be economical to build. We changed the street façade of our house during the renovation by adding a second window directly over the ground floor window and raising a parapet wall to enclose a new rooftop terrace.

Row houses developed in Europe during the industrial revolution as a means of providing medium density housing for industrial workers and their families. For Anglophones the term row houses is sometimes replaced with “terrace houses” and brings to mind images of working class neighbourhoods in England—think of the television show Coronation Street. With the movement of people from the countryside to urban areas, property owners maximized their profits by building standardised units and squeezing as many of them as possible on a given area of land. Because of the delayed state of industrial development in Spain the row house developed later in this country. In Vilassar de Dalt the appearance of the Casa de Cos coincides with the establishment of textile factories that in the 19th century became the backbone of the town´s economy. Rows of houses clustered around the factories to house workers and managers. Often the factory and housing were built at the same time as one single project financed by the factory owner who wanted both to attract workers and house them nearby. In neighbouring towns, such as Vilassar de Mar and Premia de Mar, the Casa de Cos also served as housing for fishermen and their families. It should be noted that these towns also had significant textile industries. On the other hand the Casa de Cos is absent from Alella, Arenys de Munt, Calella, Malgrat, Mongat or Premia de Dalt, all nearby towns but which did not have textile industries.

A row of Casas de Cos in Vilassar de Dalt. Most of the houses have been renovated, some of them beyond recognition.

Our older neighbours have told us that our house is one of at least four on the street that were built to an identical plan. This is not now apparent as over time the other houses have been altered almost beyond recognition with the addition of extra floors or changed façades but the houses as originally built would have been all much the same. Of the houses on our street, ours had been the least altered. The simple plan of the Casa de Cos allows it to be renovated with relative ease to modern standards of comfort. Across the street, neatly illustrating the symbiotic relationship between Casas de Cos and industry, is an old factory now converted into several individual houses. It is not obvious at first but Vilassar de Dalt retains one of Catalonia´s most extensive conglomerations of early industrial workers´ housing and industrial buildings. The last of Vilassar´s textile factories closed in the 1980s but several empty structures remain awaiting conversion to new uses. One is presently in the process of being changed into the town library.

The phrase Casa de Cos in Catalan means literally house of a body, the “body” in this case being a unit of length. However, in this instance the word cos derives from Latin cursum which meant this portion of land. It was an ancient unit of measurement used to divide land and later used in the construction of the traditional Catalan masias, or fortified farm houses. As unit of measurement the cos was based on the maximum span of a beam made from the native white pine (Pinus halepensis) trees. A Casa de Cos was usually built one “body” wide, but it could be a “body and half” wide or even more. The owner of a property would have asked the municipality for permission to divide a section of land into coses. A cos is approximately 20 pams wide. (A pam is literally a hand span with the pam de Barcelona set at 19.43 cm and the pam de destre at 23.5 cm.) Our house in Vilassar de Dalt is roughly rectangular in plan fitting between two parallel party walls, the corners not quite forming 90 degrees. The long axis of the house, from the inside faces of the front and rear walls, is 10.4 metres, the inside width of the house is 4.70 metres. These are typical measurements for a Casa de Cos. Presumably, our house was built using the pam de destre as 20 pams de destre equals 4.70 metres. Throughout Catalonia the Casa de Cos could vary between 20 and 30 pams with some exceptional examples up to 40 pams.

Invariably, the typical Casa de Cos consisted of a ground and second floor. Only in renovated houses would there now be a third floor. Entry into the Casa de Cos is via a pair of massive wooden doors. Although they now serve as decorative features originally the massive doors would have had a functional purpose as they led into the largest room of the house, a space that would have served the original owners as a workshop or storage area. The oversized doors would allow large objects to be moved in and out of the house. The front rooms have now, of course, been converted into living rooms. In our house we have created a threshold by adding a pair of French doors just inside of the main doors. Located near the centre of the house are the stairs to the second floor. The stairs were positioned so as to create a direct uncluttered passage from the front entrance to the eixida, or courtyard, behind the house.

Ground floor plan of a typical Casa de Cos. The front of the house is at the right.
The eixada, or rear courtyard is at the left.

A rebost, or pantry was built under part of the stairs. Beyond the stairs is the kitchen. By moving the door of the pantry from the kitchen to the hallway we added a downstairs bathroom with access from the hallway. The most notable features of the kitchen are the fireplace and bread oven. The bread oven consists of two parts; a lower chamber for the fire and the upper chamber where the bread was baked. The two chambers are separated by a masonry grid. The roof of the oven is a dome of roughly 1.4 metres in diameter. The bread oven was built in the space under the stair landing. The present fireplace has a chimney leading directly to the roof but the bread oven never had a separate chimney. Originally the fireplace and oven would have been vented by a large hood that drew the smoke up a single chimney. Smoke staining of the stone work around the bread oven attests to that. The kitchen has a large terrazzo sink under the window centred in the rear wall of the house. A door from kitchen leads out into the eixida. Another door in the kitchen leads to a covered area in the courtyard. This second door was likely a later addition. The covered section of the courtyard would have served as a pig pen or as a hen house. We have now converted this space into a dining room with two windows looking out to the courtyard. During the day the lower floor would have been in constant use as an area for working, cooking, washing and, for the children, as their play area. The upstairs would have been used only at night.

On the ground floor of our house the original flooring consisted of terracotta tiles 23 centimetres square and 4 centimetres thick laid on a skim coat of mortar laying directly on the leveled soil. We decided to conserve as much of the flooring as possible despite the wear in some areas. Some of the tiles had to be removed in order to install a new under-floor drainage system but our contractor was able to remove most tiles without damage and reuse them. Still, there was a deficit of tiles. The shortage problem was neatly solved by creating a runner of hydraulic tiles laid from the front door to the rear door. The hydraulic tiles are 15 centimetres square and added an interesting feature to the ground floor.

The second floor of our house is divided into three bedrooms. Many Casas de Cos would have had two bedrooms, and perhaps a large closet or storeroom, on the second floor. The front and back rooms originally had each a single window but we have added a second window to each room. The centre room, of course, did not have any windows but did have a small skylight set into the roof. The front room being larger would have been used by the parents’ of the family. The other room divided amongst the children and possibly the grandparents. Despite the size of the Casa de Cos it would have been a crowded place to live.

The structure supporting the second floor consists of three Catalan vaults. These vaults are the most singular architectural and structural features of the house. The Catalan vault (la volta catalana) is a traditional technique for building a shallow lightweight vault or arch. The vault over the front room is a barrel vault spanning 4.70 metres between the supporting walls and with a rise of only 45 centimetres. The vault is 6.15 metres long. Over the rectangular kitchen is a domed vault—the loads supported on four sides—where the corners are the lowest points of the vault. A small barrel vault, beside the stairs, spans the area between the two larger vaults. The term Catalan vault is somewhat of a misnomer because this building technique is found in various regions around the Mediterranean. To construct a barrel vault, rectangular terracotta tiles bricks are laid edge to edge on wooden form work. In the case of a domed vault the form work can be sometimes be eliminated. Using wooden battens to guide the laying of the tiles a domed vault can be quickly constructed. Depending on the span and loads to be carried by the vault, two or more courses of tiles would have been laid. The advantages of the Catalan vault are its light weight compared to a stone vault, the economical use of common terracotta materials and the short construction time.

A Catalan vault spanning over the front room of a Casa de Cos
 under renovation.

In our house to support the floor tiles of the second floor, ribs of ceramic brick are supported by the vaults. The result is that a good part of the second floor structure is hollow. This of course reduces the weight and also lowers the lateral loads that must somehow be carried by the supporting walls. The flooring of the second floor consists of 30 x 15 centimetre ceramic tiles laid in a herringbone pattern. Lifting the flooring tile allows access to the hollows over the vaults. With care, plumbing and electrical runs can be placed within the hollows except near the centre of the span where the space over the load carrying vault is thinnest.


A Catalan vault consisting of four layers of ceramic masonry supporting a small
 bridge.

Vilassar de Dalt has an interesting historical connection to the diffusion of the Catalan vault to North America. The engineer and architect Rafael Guastavino built Vilassar´s La Massa theatre. It was his last commision in Spain before emigrating to the United States in 1881. The theatre features a circular Catalan vault of 17 meters in diameter and a rise of 3.5 metres. It is a fine example of the technique and it inspired us to preserve and maintain the vaults in our house. The theatre is only about 150 metres from our house. In the United States Guastatavino patented the Catalan vault and used the technique on some of the most prestigious American buildings of the early 20th century including Grand Central Terminal, Carnegie Hall both in New York City and the Boston Public Library.

Not all Casas de Cos would have made use of the vault. Other examples would have floors supported by wood beams. But timber of sufficient size would have been difficult and expensive to obtain in 19th century Catalonia. (Old photographs of the surrounding mountains reveal how few trees were available in the 19th century.) Still others used a system of iron beams with ceramic infill blocks supporting the floor above. In many renovations the vaults and wood beams have been replaced by modern concrete or wood structural systems. This probably reflects the reluctance of contemporary contractors and architects from dealing with structural masonry systems.

Looking up at the structure of the second floor of a Casa de Cos.
The rough hewn pine beams support wood stringers which in turn
carry planking. The finished floor consists of ceramic tile laid on
 the planking

Originally, in our house the underside of the vaults were covered with a layer of plaster to smooth out the unevenness of the masonry. We elected to remove the plaster and expose the vaults. The exposed masonry is a testament of the masons’ skills. The ceilings are high enough that the ground floor rooms do not feel like caves. Our house faces south-east and is located on a relatively wide street so that lots of natural light enters though the windows and the glass doors of the threshold.

The roof line of the Casa de Cos is simple, a ridge over the centre of the house slopes both to the street and the courtyard. The original roofing consisted of teulada, the traditional roofing tile found throughout Spain. Both our contractor and architect agreed that it would be very difficult to remove the original teulada without damaging the individual tiles to some extent so we replaced them with new ones. Nevertheless, we did note that the contractor carefully removed the old roof tiles and trucked them away. We were happy to use modern roofing tiles if they could guarantee the integrity of the roof—i.e. that it kept the rain out.

Cross-section through a typical Casa de Cos. The front facade is
to the right. There is a vault over the kitchen, ground floor left, but
wood beams span over the ground floor front room.

As originally built, the roof of our house was supported by wood beams. The beams were essentially tree trunks stripped of bark and set onto the side walls. Scarcity of suitable timber in the vicinity of Vilassar de Dalt can be inferred by the use of some very bent logs in our house. The builder and original owner of our house would not have been too fussy about appearances. Shims were used to fill the gaps between the timbers and the underside of the roof planking. The planks carried a layer of what is essentially earth on which the roof tiles were placed. It was obvious from the time of our first pre-purchase visits that the beams would be a problem. A cursory inspection found them all to have been damaged by woodworm, some of them severely. We decided to replace them all with glue-laminated wood beams. As the old beams were removed it became apparent just how badly damaged they were. The new beams were treated against woodworm.

The loads supported by the roof beams and vaults are carried by the thick party walls (the side walls we share with the neighbours). These party walls are made of tapia, nothing more than packed mud and cobbles. Confined on either side by wood forms, moist earth is packed down with rams. Successive layers of tapia are gradually built up to the required height. Horizontal loads from the floor vaults between adjacent houses would cancel each other but still the walls had to be thick enough to eliminate the need for buttresses. During the renovation of our house when I looked at the exposed mud walls I had the impression the walls were made up of pre-formed blocks of tapia—akin to adobe blocks—cemented together with a mortar of some sort. It would certainly speed up the drying of the walls. One source that I found stated that it could take up to two years for the moisture content of a tapia wall to each a state of equilibrium. It would have made sense to use pre-dried and pre-formed blocks especially if the walls had to support the relatively heavy loads of vaulted construction. With brittle masonry vaults susceptible to cracking it would also be critical to reduce the amount of movement. Using pre-formed adobe-type blocks would help reduce movement due to shrinkage as the walls dried.

The use of tapia construction seems to have been common practice in Vilassar. I have seen other houses in town with mud walls. Certainly the workmen doing the renovations to our house were familiar with tapia walls and comfortable working with the material, for example when they made the openings for two new windows of the second floor bedrooms. However, I suspect that they would be at a loss if they had to build up a new wall of tapia, while on the other hand they were very adept with brick masonry construction. The exterior walls are thick, at the ground floor the rear wall is 58 cm thick, at the street façade it is 48 cm. From the second floor up, the walls are thinner, 56 and 41 centimeters thick respectively. I am not sure why the walls are were not built the same in front and rear but the tapia of the front walls had some larger pieces of stone embedded. The party walls, or rather the walls we share with our neighbours and carry the horizontal loads from the vaults are at least 90 cm thick.

It is important to allow tapia to dry out and then to protect it from rain and groundwater. Sometime ago we saw the result of water damage to a tapia wall not far from our house when the wall of an old house partially collapsed into the roadway. That house, which was then under renovation, had not been properly protected from the elements. After a couple of days of heavy rain a portion of the wall had been weakened. During our own renovation, removal of the old roof coincided with the April rains and particular care was taken to protect the tops of the walls by covering them with waterproof tarps. Our architect insisted that a continuous band of concrete reinforced with steel bars was added to the top of the tapia walls.

One source states that in Premia de Mar some of the old fishermen’s Casas de Cos were constructed with the ground floors below street level for two reasons. First, it helped stabilize the temperature within the house by increasing the thermal inertia of the ground floor thus making it more comfortable in summer and winter. During the day the lower floor was the centre of activity and keeping it cooler in summer and facilitating heating in winter would have been advantageous. The upper floor was used only at night. Secondly, by excavating below street level a ready source of material for building the tapia walls would have been at hand.

The bases of the tapia walls are also susceptible to moisture infiltration from soils supporting the walls. So it is also important to control groundwater near the building. In our house water leaking from the main under-floor drain likely caused some damage to the base of the wall in the kitchen. This was apparent when we first visited the house. It was obvious where the under-floor drain ran. It did not help that the original under-floor drain consisted of a rectangular channel formed from bricks—needless to say such channels leak tremendously.

The eixida, or courtyard, at the rear of the house is roughly 5 x 3.5 metres. About a third of the courtyard has a vaulted roof over it. There is a large safareig, or laundry sink in a corner of the courtyard supplied by an overhead water tank built into the corner formed by the walls. The tank would have been filled bucket by bucket and later connected to the municipal water supply. A few of our older neighbours who have lived in Vilassar all of their lives have told us that some houses on our street had wells in the courtyard. Access to these wells was shared between two or three neighbouring houses. That our immediate neighbour´s house had the well is obvious as there is a pulley wheel hanging from a bracket on the wall. A measure of how little altered had been our house can be inferred by the fact that when we bought it there was only one point of inside water supply, a cold water faucet over the kitchen sink. A shower and water closet had at some point been added under the vaulted portion of the courtyard but to access it one had to dash outside. A small electric caldera, or water heater, heated the water for the shower. Few Casas de Cos as originally built would have had inside sanitation facilities. The most common solution would be an outhouse over a dry well, or holding tank, that would be periodically emptied by a local farmer requiring fertilizer. Our house had been in the same family for most if not all of the 20th century and obviously the owners had not kept up with the times.

An interesting feature of our house is the front garden. The ownership of this small plot of land is problematic. Almost certainly it was originally part of the house but at some point it was severed from the lot and ownership passed to the municipality. The garden measures roughly 5 by 7 metres. It is very small to have served as a vegetable garden but still today there are in Vilassar similar sized gardens that supply their owner’s tables. Our immediate neighbour also has a similar space but, as far as I know, in Vilassar these are the only two houses with such an arrangement.

These 19th century Casas de Cos originally housed
fishermen and their families in Vilassar de Mar.

In other towns these small gardens were more common. In Premia de Mar the streets were laid out parallel to the sea and whole blocks of Casas de Cos were built with the front façade facing south (and the sea). Behind the house, to the north, was a garden and beyond that the eixida with a safareig, the outhouse and a fruit tree, usually an orange or lemon tree. From the courtyard there was access to the next street across which was another row of Casas de Cos. In Vilassar de Mar the streets were also laid out parallel to the sea. Again the front facades of the Casas de Cos were on the north side of the streets. However, the garden corresponding to each house was across the street to the south. In the 1950s Vilassar de Mar’s garden plots were taxed out of existence and built over with new construction that was generally higher than the Casas de Cos. I found one street in Vilassar de Mar that still retains the original arrangement of houses and garden plots, however, where once vegetables were grown now cars are parked. Our house with its garden plot in front and the eixida in the rear would have had a similar layout to that of those Vilassar de Mar houses.

Casas de Cos in Vilassar de Mar with their front gardens intact.

The Casa de Cos is a simple structure but in it we find some interesting links to Catalonia´s social and industrial history. Though they may be plain and unadorned they serve as repositories of traditional construction methods. The volta Catalana and tapia wall are no longer used but are part of the region´s architectural heritage. The very basic structure lends itself to easy upgrading, renovation and conversion. Most Casas de Cos continue in their original function, as single family dwellings, but many have been converted into offices (for example, our architect´s office in Vilassar de Mar), small shops or as workshops. Our renovated Casa de Cos is comfortable and homey. The major change that we made, add a third floor and terrace, resulted in a studio with a view of the sea. The house may be somewhat rustic with the odd dash of tiles in the kitchen or on the stair risers and treads but it has character. From the street the Casa de Cos seems to hide and rebuff attention but once inside it has secrets to reveal.