A modernista cotton mill that spent longer as a police barracks than as a factory

At the bottom of Montjuïc, between the Magic Fountain and the Plaça d’Espanya roundabout, there is a brick building with battlements and two towers that most people take for a castle, a monastery or a fake.

It is a cotton mill. It is by the architect who built Les Punxes and Casa Amatller. And it has spent most of its life doing something other than what it was designed for.

Built in a hurry, because the old one burned

Josep Puig i Cadafalch, for Casimir Casarramona, dated by the Generalitat 1909–1912.

The COAC supplies the reason for the pace, and it is not the reason anyone expects for a building this ornamental: the mill es va haver de fer amb gran rapidesa a causa de l’incendi de la vella fàbrica del carrer de la Riereta. The previous works, in the Raval, had burned down. This is a replacement, put up fast, in a place that at the time was outside the city.

The plan is a factory plan, not a palace one — tres naus destinades a filats, magatzems i teixits, separades per dos carrers interiors. Three halls for spinning, storage and weaving, with two internal streets between them, which is why walking through it today feels like walking through a small town.

The Municipal Archive holds the paperwork: a cross-section of la fàbrica de fil i teixit de cotó Casarramona, signed 4 August 1911, file 12190/1910.

The two towers are not chimneys

This is the correction worth carrying in with you.

The Generalitat’s heritage record describes the structure precisely — brick vaults on iron pillars, relieving arches and metal ties countering the lateral thrust into buttresses ending in pinnacles, battlements of brick — and then says of the towers: les dues torres, que amaguen antics dipòsits d’aigua, marquen l’eix de simetria del conjunt.

They hide old water tanks. They are there to mark the axis of the composition.

Which brings up the thing everybody says about this building, and which we cannot stand up. The story is that Casaramona has no chimney because it ran on electricity. We looked for that on the Generalitat’s record, on the COAC’s file, on the Ajuntament’s pages and in the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, and it is not on any of them.

So we are telling you the absence is real and striking — a mill of this size and date with no chimney — and that the explanation everybody gives for it has no institutional source we could find. If somebody offers you the electricity story as a fact, they are not reading it off a heritage file.

The prize, and its actual name

The Generalitat says the factory va guanyar el premi de l’Ajuntament de Barcelona l’any que va ser acabada.

The competition has a name, and it is not the one you will see quoted. The COAC files it under the Concurs Anual d’Edificis i Establiments Urbans, architecture category, dated 1912. The city’s Municipal Archive describes the same competition and places Casaramona among the finalists for 1911.

The consistent formulation is: the municipal competition for 1911, decided in 1912. Nobody institutional calls it a prize for the best industrial building — that is a paraphrase that has hardened into a fact.

Listed in 1976, in very good company

Long before the museum, the building was protected — by Decreto 248/1976, de 9 de enero, published in the BOE on 17 February 1976.

What makes that decree worth reading is the list. In one article it declares national historic-artistic monuments: Casa Martí «Els Quatre Gats», Casa Amatller, Casa Macaya, the three Casas Terrades «Les Punxes», the Palau del Barón de Cuadras, the Codorníu cellars — and «Fábrica Casarramona».

The decree’s own framing puts the mill in the same sentence as the rest: among Puig i Cadafalch’s most valued works, and entre los edificios industriales, this one and Codorníu.

In 1976 the Spanish state listed a disused cotton mill alongside the most famous café in Barcelona. Sixteen years later it was still a police station.

The long second life

Here is the fact that reframes the building, and the Generalitat states it in one line: des de la fi de la Guerra Civil, es va utilitzar com a quartel de la Policia Nacional fins el 1992.

From the end of the Civil War until 1992. More than fifty years as a barracks.

And here is what nobody publishes: how long it actually worked as a factory. No institutional source we found gives a date for the end of production. The Generalitat jumps straight from the building’s completion to the barracks; the Ajuntament says only that amb el pas dels anys, l’edifici va deixar enrere la seva funció productiva.

You will read that Casaramona barely produced at all. It may be true. It is not sourced, and the honest version — that the building was designed as a mill, listed as a monument, used as a police station for half a century, and that the productive period in between is undated in the public record — is stranger and better.

The Fundació «la Caixa» acquired it after 1992, restored it and adapted it. CaixaForum Barcelona opened in 2002: 12,000 m², a collection of 800 works, a media library.

The conversion is credited by the COAC to Roberto Luna, Francisco Javier Asarta, Arata Isozaki, the engineering firm BOMA and Robert Brufau, dated 1998–2002. The Ajuntament describes Isozaki’s contribution as new elements that live with the original sense eclipsar-la — without eclipsing it.

What to do with it

Admission arrangements exist and change; we do not print them. What is worth knowing is where it sits.

It is at the bottom, on the flat. Casaramona, the Mies pavilion and the Magic Fountain are within about three minutes of each other, and they are the only group on this hill you can see without climbing. If you have an hour rather than an afternoon, that is the hour.

Go for the building, not only for the show. The exhibitions rotate. The brick, the internal streets and the roof terrace under the pinnacles do not.

And look at it from across the road before you go in. From the far side of the avenue the silhouette reads as what it was meant to read as: a modernista architect insisting that an industrial shed deserved the same attention as a house on Passeig de Gràcia — which is the whole argument of modernisme beyond Gaudí, made in brick, for cotton.

Our Montjuïc walking tour starts a two-minute walk from here, at the foot of the Venetian towers in Plaça d’Espanya, and goes up through the fairground and the castle. Whether the hill earns the afternoon at all: is Montjuïc worth it.