Welcome to Ensanche and Pescaría, a tour through the city from the early 20th century. Streets where luxurious facades of two styles of the time coexist, the sober eclectic style and the modernity inherited from Art Nouveau that arrived from Europe. Discover how, on many occasions, architects mixed both styles in their facades. Walking through the most commercial streets of the city, located between the beaches and the port, will tell you about what daily life is like today in the center of A Coruña and how those times of bourgeois splendor were. We present to you A Coruña of 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 began the expansion of the city with the extension in the current streets of the Plaza de Lugo area. In this setting, outside the walls, formed by the Ensanche and Pescaría*, the new bourgeoisie associated with overseas businesses built majestic homes that reflected their economic power. They thus marked differences with the Coruña aristocracy that inhabited the palaces of the Old City. Initially, their homes were of a sober eclecticism, and it was not until the early 20th century that architects introduced the first touches of the new and carefree style imported from Central Europe. In A Coruña, Modernism transformed the traditional galleries, filling the facades with color and joy with decorative elements inspired by the forms of nature and female faces. The installation of the Wonenburger foundry in our city enriched the balconies, portals, and decorative elements with iron as an artistic element and identity in the Coruña “Art Nouveau”. *Pescaría is the area between the Old City, the Orzán cove, the port, and the current Juana de Vega street.

Ensanche and Pescaría, several streets, A Coruña.