Sitges, Rusiñol's town by the sea: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Rusiñol's artists' town and the seafront
Santiago Rusiñol arrived in Sitges in 1891 and made the town a gathering place for Modernista artists, while Cuban fortunes and an American collector shaped the town around him.
The stops
The asymmetrical church on its hill above the beach is one of the most characteristic images of Sitges. The present baroque building was begun in 1665 and blessed on 18 July 1672, on the site of two earlier churches, a Romanesque one and a Gothic one from 1322. Charles Deering, the American philanthropist behind the Maricel palaces on this walk, commissioned the modern paintings of its Chapel of the Santíssim and its presbytery, by Darius Vilàs.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 Sitges's town hall stands at the highest point of the town, where the medieval castle used to be. The State handed the castle's land to the town council in 1870, and building began on 25 August 1888 under the architect Salvador Vinyals. The big Gothic windows of the demolished castle were reused in the façade of Rusiñol's Cau Ferrat.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 This 2011 sculpture by Ramon Cuello on the Passeig de la Ribera is dedicated to the painters Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas. The two friends travelled through Catalonia together in 1889, Rusiñol writing and Casas illustrating the book Por Cataluña (desde mi carro), and then lived together at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre. Rusiñol arrived in Sitges in October 1891, and the Cau Ferrat he built here holds paintings by Casas.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 Rusiñol launched the idea of this monument as a symbol of the Modernisme that gathered around the Cau Ferrat. A committee formed on 30 July 1896 raised 8,043 pesetas from 192 subscribers, the first stone was laid on 24 August 1897, and Josep Reynés's statue was inaugurated on 29 August 1898. The figure of the painter deteriorated over the years, and in the early 1970s it was reproduced in a new version by Ortiz.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 Facundo Bacardí was born in Sitges in 1813, the son of a bricklayer, followed his older brothers to Cuba in 1828 and founded the Bacardí rum distillery there in 1862. Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries thousands of young people from Sitges settled in eastern Cuba, and the americanos, as those who came home rich were known, left a legacy still visible in the town's architecture. This monument on the Passeig de la Ribera, by Lorenzo Quinn, dates from 2009.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 Casa Llopis was built in 1793 outside the walls of the medieval town for a local seafaring family who rose through land and the trade in wines and liquors. In the 19th century the post office was on its ground floor, and the lion-shaped letter box with an open mouth beside the front door still recalls it. Its cellar is where the Llopis family made their famous Malvasia, and the Romantic Museum, whose main-floor rooms first opened to the public in 1949, shows how a well-off family lived in the 19th century.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 This house behind the town hall dates from 1915 according to the inscription on its façade, and belongs to the Maricel buildings begun in 1910 under the direction of Miquel Utrillo. Utrillo, an art critic, had shared the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre with Rusiñol and Casas, and he died in Sitges in 1934. Since 1936 it has housed the Santiago Rusiñol public library, which opened in June 1936, five years after Rusiñol's death.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1893 Santiago Rusiñol paid 1,000 pesetas for a little fisherman's house by the sea and another 2,000 to have it knocked down, so that a new home and studio could be built to plans commissioned from the architect Francesc Rogent. In November 1894, during the third Festa Modernista, he held a second inauguration timed to coincide with the arrival of two El Greco paintings he had bought in Paris, and the house became a favourite gathering place for the bohemians of the day. He left it with all its collections to the town, and it opened as a public museum on 16 April 1933.
Photo: Till F. Teenck — CC BY-SA 2.5 The American collector Charles Deering had the Maricel complex built between 1910 and 1918 on both sides of Carrer de Fonollar, joined by a bridge, with Miquel Utrillo directing the work. Maricel de Mar, built on the rocks, became a museum in 1970, a year after the Barcelona provincial government bought it to house the collection of the gynaecologist Jesús Pérez-Rosales, and it also holds Ramon Casas's portrait of Deering. Deering left Sitges in 1921 and took much of his art collection with him.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 Nicolau Ortiz i Serra made this 1977 monument to Santiago Rusiñol, which stands in a small garden in front of the Vidal Quadras house. Rusiñol was a painter, writer, collector and dramatist born in Barcelona in 1861, who saw art as a priesthood, and it was from Sitges that he spread his theory of Total Art. He died in 1931, leaving the Cau Ferrat and everything in it to the town.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 The hermitage of Sant Sebastià is part of the Sitges cemetery, where it serves as the chapel. Nothing documents the first hermitage, which is thought to date from the 8th century, and an inscription of 1614 on its walls led historians to date a remodelling to that year. The present building was begun in 1857 by the master builder Francesc Cros and blessed on 23 August 1861, and in the goigs, the devotional verses in the saint's honour, Sitges thanks him for freeing it from the plague.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0
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