"Don Javier Camps y Puigmartí, burial at half past eight this morning, from the church of Santa Ana to the Southwest cemetery." Barely three lines under the heading Burials and Funerals in La Vanguardia on February 13, 1890 bid farewell to a visionary businessman who years before had caused rivers of ink to flow in this and other newspapers. This is the story that was not told on February 13, 133 years ago.
There was still one more note about the deceased, eight days later, on February 21: "For the soul of Don Javier Camps and Puigmartí, masses will be celebrated today from eight to twelve in the morning in the church of Santa Ana, being the offertory those from ten to twelve”. And then the silence, the fog. Just two years before, this great man appeared for the first time in the main newspaper of the city, as a result of the constitution of an important society.
At the end of the 19th century, Barcelona was a capital in expansion. And I was thirsty. Each Barcelonan had an average of 19 liters a day, when 200 was recommended. Francisco Javier Camps y Puigmartí, his full name (which some later Catalanize, although it appears in Spanish in all the documents of the time) set out to remedy this scarcity with the groundwater flows of his estate in Poblenou.
Soon to be the most industrial district of Barcelona and one of the most industrial in Spain, Poblenou was and is in Sant Martí de Provençals, a municipality that ended up being annexed by Barcelona, as another district. Its toponymy reveals its past (Taulat, Llacuna, Arenal de Llevant...). The estate of Javier Camps was in the Taulat area (from taulats, fields of cultivation) and was rich in underground water.
A chemist and pharmacist certified the purity of this underground treasure, fed by the Besòs River. That expert was called José Canudas Salada. Pay attention to his second last name, which will prove prophetic in this sad story. Javier Camps invested his entire fortune in his business adventure. He also involved his family and many of his friends in the business. He was the spitting image of success on February 19, 1881.
La Vanguardia reported that day on the creation of “the Barcelona General Water Company, right bank of the Besòs”. Such a name does not say much today, but that company supplied water to a good part of the city for ten years, at the end of the 19th century. Until relatively recently, a manhole cover from this company survived in Ciutat Vella, which is now kept by the Poblenou Historical Archive.
Javier Camps already knew the excellence of these waters from the Besòs, since for a time he was a partner of the Alsatian brewer August Kuentzmann Damm, who used them for his first Damm beers. The business had just one problem. Actually, he had two, although we'll talk about the second later. You had to get to the water and channel it to Barcelona. But that first challenge was easy to undertake.
To extract the flow and pump it, our industrialist commissioned a tower from the architect Pere Falqués, the same as the modernist lampposts on Passeig de Gràcia. The work was completed at the end of 1882. A little earlier, on June 26 of that year, La Vanguardia visited the tower, which was not yet finished and was 51 meters high (it would end up being 63). An anonymous writer from this house was part of the extensive entourage that traveled to Poblenou.
Among the visitors there were canons "representing the bishop", politicians, soldiers, engineers, architects, master builders, chemists and "other people whose names we do not remember". Although the tower was not yet at full capacity, the entourage witnessed how one of the machines worked, "which, despite having only half its strength, propelled the water from the reservoir to a height of 40 meters."
Then, due to the law of gravity, the supply reached far away Barcelona, as the visitors verified when they got off the carriage “to witness the arrival of the water at Bogatell”, which today gives its name to an urban beach in Barcelona. They did not get off just for that: "The company treated the guests to a superb lunch at the Francia restaurant." There also took place what was perhaps the last toast of Javier Camps.
The head of the company was at his best. When everyone raised their glasses, "Mr. Camps thanked the authorities, the doctors and the press." And at the same time, those honored returned the compliments: "All those present offered their support to the company, since this provides a service to Barcelona, which is so lacking in water, the first element that public health demands" .
All this happened, let us remember, in 1882. Eight years later, the good omens were broken. Well, the one that went bankrupt was the company. The Barcelona City Council, as we published on June 26, 1890, warned that the water was no longer suitable even for irrigation due to its excessive salinity. The drought, the overexploitation of the aquifer and the proximity of the sea (the second big problem that we mentioned before) ruined society.
The mist surrounds the premature death of Javier Camps. For the press at that time, it was taboo to talk about suicide. A very popular version, although it has not been able to be documented, maintains that he left a farewell note in which he stated that salt ran through his veins. He then jumped off the roof of the tower. Among others, the architect Jordi Fossas, president of the Arxiu Històric del Poblenou, is inclined towards this possibility.
Sic transit gloria mundi. Three measly lines. This is how La Vanguardia said goodbye to the person who was going to solve "the first element that public health demands." The tower was initially bought by an English company, which resold it in 1895 to Aguas de Barcelona, the embryo of Agbar. Popular gossip held that Agbar bought it only to certify the death of the only competitor who put him in trouble.
