From 1908, when the writer, poet and politician Ferran Agulló coined the term Costa Brava for the first time in his daily column in La Veu de Catalunya, a real fever arose to discover the virgin heritage of this coastline.
During the first third of the 20th century, initiatives such as public baths appeared, among which there were those in Sant Elm, in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, which had a doctor's office, steam showers or Turkish baths and which in the summer they organized concerts, sardanas, dances or film screenings.
Other maritime leisure practices were also born, such as Viatges Blaus, an initiative promoted by the entrepreneur established in Barcelona Jaume Marill between 1929 and 1936, which consisted of chartering large boats, with choirs and choirs that enlivened the journey from Barcelona to discover the virgin landscape of Sant Feliu, Tossa, Palamós or Roses. "It was a cultural activity: the ship left Barcelona at six in the morning and returned at midnight. It was very successful", explains Xavier Roca, technician at the History Museum of Sant Feliu de Guíxols.
The photographer Ricard Mur Gargallo, born in the Zaragoza town of Gallur in 1875, settled in Sant Feliu de Guíxols between 1906 and 1907, where he created his own photographic studio. His photos were a witness to that first tourism and to a landscape that is no longer recoverable. Between the years 1910 and 1930 he portrayed the Costa Brava from Blanes to Cadaqués and focused much of his work on Sant Feliu de Guíxols and its immediate surroundings. The director of the Museum of History, Sílvia Alemany, explains that he was one of the few photographers established in Catalonia who published postcards with images of the destination and also collected aspects of daily life and trades such as fishing or linked to the cork industry, with a large weight in the municipality and which ended up employing more than 3,000 people. Postcards that today can still be purchased online at the price of gold: 25 euros per copy.
An exhibition at the Museum of History of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, with photographs rescued from the archive, allows you to discover that almost virgin territory before mass tourism that Mur witnessed with his camera. Unusual images such as the road that leads to Tossa de Mar, at the height of Canyet, one of the few coves that belong to Santa Cristina d'Aro, free of buildings, with the sole exception of a farmhouse. A landscape that the mayor of Tossa, Ramon Gascons, points out is "relatively unchanged", with the exception of the urbanization of Cala Salions, built between the 1970s and 1980s, which he describes as "an urban wreck".
The sea front of Palamós, when it still lived with its back to tourism, or the beach of Platja d'Aro, without a trace of the tall buildings that damaged the first line of both municipalities during the real estate boom, is more shocking. "Thanks to figures like Mur, we have had an x-ray of what the Costa Brava was like," explains Alemany.
Mur also portrayed the society of the time practicing their hobbies, such as a football match; enjoying the traveling opera Marina in 1910, which was not performed in a theater but in front of the sea, or contemplating the commotion caused by the discovery of a 14-meter-long whale on the beach. “He was a great photojournalist; wherever there was news, he was there with his camera", remarks Roca.
