Welcome to Ensanche and Pescaría, a visit to the city in the early twentieth century. Streets where luxurious facades of two styles of the time coexist, the sober eclectic style and the modernity inherited from Art Nouveau arrived from Europe. Discover how, on many occasions, architects mixed both styles on their facades.

Strolling along the most commercial streets of the city, located between the beaches and the port, we can see what daily life is like today in the center of Coruña and what those times of bourgeois splendor were like.

Let us introduce you to A Coruña in 1900 and today.

Year 1906

The same year that José María Rivera Corral founded his brewery in A Coruña, La Estrella de Galicia, Ricardo Boán y Quellas completed his modernist building on the popular Barreira street. The former had emigrated to Cuba and Mexico; the architect was a native of Cuba, this coincidence speaks of the importance of the Americas and the sea in this bourgeois city, which was then full of luxurious bathhouses.

The expansion

In 1883 A Coruña undertakes the expansion of the city with the widening of the current streets in the area of Praza de Lugo. In this scenario, outside the walls, formed by the Ensanche and Pescaría*, the new bourgeoisie associated to the overseas business, builds huge houses that reflect their economic power. They marked, this way, differences with the aristocracy of A Coruña that inhabited the palaces of the Cidade Vella. At first, their houses were soberly eclectic, and it was not until the beginning of the 20th century when the architects introduced the first touches of the new, carefree style imported from Central Europe.

In Coruña, Modernism transforms the traditional galleries, filling the facades with color and joy with decorative elements inspired by the forms of nature and feminine faces. The installation of the Wonenburger foundry in our city, enriched the balconies, doors and decorative elements with iron as an artistic element, and of identity, in the “Art Nouveau” of A Coruña.

*Pescaría is the area between the Cidade Vella, the enseada do Orzán, the port and the current Juana de Vega street.

Ensanche and Pescaría, several streets, A Coruña.