If you have jeans or any other garment that contains buttons, rivets or another type of metallic element, it most likely came from the almost hundred-year-old Can Waldes factory in Poblenou. This emblematic industry, based in a protected building, also has a wonderful basement, covered with glazed ceramic tiles and made up of dozens of rooms connected to each other, a kind of unique underground cathedral.
Can Waldes opened in 1924 in Poblenou, in a building designed in 1919 by the engineer Darío Daura. Originally, it was to be used for oil production. Warehouses for its storage are precisely the rooms into which the basement is divided. The factory floor still retains the metal lids through which those tanks were accessed. However, the oil project did not prosper and the building was used for other industrial uses, at which time the warehouses were connected to each other by arched doors and the basement was used for some work and storage.
The activity for which Can Waldes has been known for almost 100 years began in Poblenou in 1924, when a Czech industrialist, Jindrich Waldes, bought the building and opened a metal accessories factory for clothing. Waldes had started his company in Prague in 1902 and, before Barcelona, he had already extended his business in Dresden, Warsaw, Paris and New York. Everything was cut short when Waldes, of Jewish origin, was arrested by the Nazi authorities and deported in 1940 to the Jena concentration camp and later to Buchenwald. The family, installed in the United States, managed to free him, but he died during the trip to America due to the physical deterioration suffered.
Can Waldes and its underground cathedral are located at calle Ramon Turró, 111-129. The activity continues, although in 1981 the process of acquisition of the factory by the workers was completed, constituting the current cooperative, as a consequence of the recession of 1974. The magnificent basement is today mostly empty, except for some rooms that maintain the warehouse function. In others, old machinery that bears witness to its history is preserved.
