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At the beginning of the 20th century, Barcelona was not yet the city we know today and many of the current areas were not then (especially Diagonal Avenue).
They were undeveloped land that did not even belong to Barcelona. We have proof of this in a photo from 1917, at the current intersection of the current Diagonal with Balmes, monitoring the arrival of one of the Sarrià railway convoys to warn pedestrians of the imminent danger.
The missing Chalet Fabra was located at the current 264 Muntaner Street on the corner of Porvenir, although in the City Council's cadastral record the number was listed as 276-280.
It was built in 1915 by the architect Miquel Madorell Rius, president of the Association of Architects between 1922 and 1925 and member in 1926 of the Barcelona Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Among other works, he built the current Tivoli Theater in 1919. With the construction of Araceli Fabra's chalet, Madorell, in 1916, he obtained the First Mention in the annual Artistic Buildings Competition awarded by the Barcelona City Council and which was awarded at the time by the mayor Antoni Martínez i Domingo
Araceli Fabra i Puig, wife of Antoni Ribas i Casanovas, owner of Can Cabús de Baix (mansion located in the municipality of Alella), was the daughter of Camil Fabra and Maria Dolors Puig i Cerdà and sister of Román Fabra i Puig, first marquis of The Masnou
In January 1913, Ribas's widow, Araceli Fabra, asked the City Council for a license to build two buildings designed by the architect Miquel Madorell on a property she owned.
The site where the two buildings were built was located between the current Travessera de Gràcia and Avenir street, in front of another of the important houses that were built at that time, the Casa de Isabel Llorach. Its construction began in 1915, in a French style, surrounded by a garden.
The main building would be for Ferran Fabra, second Marquis of Alella and the second less important would be the residence, until the end of her days, of Araceli Fabra herself.
For those unaware of the Fabra surname and the family's history in our city, I will tell you that Ferran, together with his brother Román Fabra, ran the old factory installed in San Andrés, Hilaturas Fabra y Coats.
Both brothers continued the work carried out by their father Camil in favor of providing the city with the latest advances, financing the construction of the current Fabra Observatory, inaugurated on April 7, 1904 by Alfonso XIII.
In those years, Camil Fabra only thought about giving the city and its citizens an instrument that would provide them with the most approximate possible weather forecasts and a slight knowledge of astronomy and the universe that surrounds us.
Despite its longevity and the deficiencies in terms of progress it suffers, the Fabra Observatory is currently considered the fourth oldest active observatory in the world.
The missing Chalet Fabra has a dark history linked to the fact that its owner was a millionaire, which cost her requisition by the government of the Republic and, later, by the dictatorship.
In 1937, the building was seized as the headquarters of the Council of State by the Government of the Republic. This was the fundamental reason that, after the entry of Franco's troops on January 26, 1939, the chalet was requisitioned by the DERD (State Delegation for the Recovery of Documents) on February 4 by order of the Captain General of Catalonia , Eliseo Álvarez-Arenas.
In this building, not only was the documentation abandoned by the former Council of State of the Republic controlled, but all the papers confiscated in the successive records carried out by the DERD were stored.
The papers and documents seized at the end of the war were concentrated in the Chalet Araceli Fabra building and were later sent to Salamanca to the attention of Marcelino de Ulibarri, State delegate for the Recovery of Documents.
On the occasion of the declaration of autonomy, these documents were requested by the Government of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the famous "Salamanca papers", which we heard about on the news for a long time.
But, continuing with the history of the house, in 1945 the businessman Julio Muñoz Ramonet, owner of various textile companies and the El Siglo and El Águila warehouses, among others, acquired the property.
Muñoz Ramonet died in 1991, leaving in his will the property on Muntaner Street with all its contents to the city of Barcelona. In 1994, the Julio Muñoz Ramonet Foundation was created in order to protect and care for inherited heritage.
