The official history of the Sagrada Família records that in its beginnings, in the midst of small donations, there was one that, due to its amount, allowed an important leap to be made in the works and especially in the Nativity façade. And it is also said that the mysterious donor responded to the name of Isabel. Little else was known. The Japanese architect and writer Tokutoshi Torii pointed out that it could be a third wife of the industrialist and patron Joan Güell, but now Julià Bretos, a Gaudí lover, has not only rejected it but has given her a name: her name was Isabel Bolet i Vidiella and was the widow of the owner of an important blacksmith shop.
Around Gaudí and the history of the Sagrada Família there are many historians and scholars who investigate, looking for an unknown sketch, a new photo of the architect or that film that is known to exist but has not just come out. The art historian Josep Casamartina believes that care must be taken because “Gaudí has treated himself very hagiographically” and some of his biographies are “full of blunders”. So let's go by parts.
The great promoter of the Sagrada Família was the philanthropist and bookseller Josep Maria Bocabella, founder of the Spiritual Association of Devotees of San José. From this entity, which had 600,000 members, and from the magazine El Propagador de la devotion de San José, with 25,000 copies, he launched the idea of building a large temple dedicated to the Sagrada Família. Bocabella bought the land of Sant Martí de Provenzales and after a first failed attempt with the architect Francisco de Paula, they recommended the young Antoni Gaudí, only 31 years old, to direct the works. The first stone of the temple was laid in 1882 and construction was initially planned for ten years, based on popular donations.
The alms of the "Josefinos" were not as expected and the works began to slow down. Even so, from the year 1891 a mysterious donation arrives. According to the magazine El Propagador, from August 1891 to May 1986, between 2,500 and 5,000 pesetas per month were entered, and from June 1896 to February 1898, 15,000 each month. Added to a last contribution of 10,000, on March 15, 1898, they added up to 577,500 pesetas. To whom is so much generosity owed, said publication asked in an article dated June 1, 1898. "In the first place, to God, secondly to Saint Joseph and thirdly to a very pious person." And he ended by saying: "Thanks to those 115,500 duros, the works of the Palace that we built in Barcelona to the Sagrada Familia have been able to advance as prodigiously and quickly as everyone contemplates and admires." A few years later, in 1926, the same magazine gave her a name: “Doña Isabel”. And she adds: “When she died, she left her large fortune to the temple, precisely, oh Providence! At the moment in which the foundations of the monumental were opened, of the bewitching facade that was not known how to pay”.
So far the only verified data that confirms us from the Archive of the Sagrada Família. Tokutoshi Torii in a 2002 article said that this half million pesetas represented more than half of the alms collected in the period 1891-1898. He described the aid as a “miracle” and said that it was only comparable to two other anonymous checks that arrived after 1915, one of them for 800,000 pesetas. Torii points out that "it is very likely that Doña Isabel of the legacy is the third wife of Joan Güell and that her son, Eusebi, was the donor of these checks."
But the doctor in Art History Raquel Lacuesta, author of the biography of Eusebi Güell, together with Xavier González Toran, assures that there was no third wife of the patron Joan Güell. He had two, the sisters Francesca and Camil·la Bacigalupi and Dulcet who died at the time of having their children and he never remarried. Nor has any document been located that proves that his son Eusebi or his wife, Isabel López y Bru, contributed to financing the temple.
And here Julià Bretos appears, a high school teacher and computer scientist, who has just published a small book Sapos y culebras (Ed. Círculo Rojo) and has an agreement with the Almuzara publishing house to publish a fictionalized version of the mysterious lady. Bretos is in a position to assure that it is Isabel Bolet i Vidiella, born in Vilanova i la Geltrú, of humble origins, who was soon orphaned and was married by proxy to her first cousin, Ignasi Marqués i Bolet, who then lived in Cuba. Ignasi is not one of those who made money in the Americas, but his brother Manuel was, who later helped him create the Sant Josep forge, first in Vilanova and later in the town of Sants, considered the second most important in Catalonia.
The Marqués-Seta couple lived at number 6 Passeig de Gràcia, where El Corte Inglés is now. But her husband died in 1885 of cholera, which he had caught in Ripoll. It seems that before she had already offered to pay for a chapel dedicated to Saint Elizabeth, but not the Virgin's cousin Elizabeth, but the Elizabeth of Hungary, and Gaudí said no, that the chapels should be consecrated to the Sagrada Família. Isabel Bolet died on September 9, 1888, at the age of 63, of pneumonia and she is buried in the cemetery of Piera, her husband's hometown. And in her will he left her inheritance in the hands of the executors. “I entrusted the lawyer Joaquim Almeda with the sale of the blacksmith shop and that the money go to the Sagrada Família”, explains Bretos.
Until reaching this conclusion, Julià Bretos has spent two and a half years investigating and thanks to one stroke of luck after another he has reached his goal. Another amateur expert, Jesús Serdio, had found the key in an article in El Diluvio (April 4, 1896) which read: “Another devotee of Saint Joseph, like Bocabella, the one who owned the Smithy of Saint Joseph of Sants , when he died he left his wife his entire fortune, and this, when dying, to the temple of her husband's devotion, so that the names of Messrs. Bocabella and Marqués must go together in the history of the temple of the Sacred Family". He stretched the thread and that led him to locate the pantheon of Manuel Marqués, at the Montjuïc cemetery, and the death record of his brother Ignasi. Finally, the name of Isabel Bolet appeared there. He later located Isabel's will in which he requests confidentiality from her executor regarding her future donations.
Joaquim Almeda i Roig, who in 1899 would be elected dean of the Barcelona Bar Association, is the one who dealt with Bocabella, and on his death with Manel de Dalmases, the distribution of money. Bretos recalls that “César Martinell, Gaudí's biographer, explains that Dalmases encouraged Gaudí to spend the money quickly before the bishop assigned it to another purpose”. The will was challenged by the brothers-in-law and in the archives of the Sagrada Família the monthly donations were recorded under a single concept: "an alms". And it is already known that legacies always have a point of mystery. And Bretos adds that behind this donation there is "an unthinkable story of love and deception" that will be revealed.
Other biographers of Gaudí raise the figure of the legacy to one million pesetas, but all agree on its importance for the Sagrada Família to be considered an exceptional temple and not just another chapel. And they also highlight the relevance of the two heels that arrived in 1915-16. They were in the name of the Board of Works, but the bishop decided that the money would go to reserve funds and only the interest would be spent, a fact that caused division and resignations. The money was deposited during the civil war in a London Bank and after the conflict it was used to rebuild the crypt and other damaged spaces. But this is another story.
