Ferrol Central Market, 1919: Photograph and Interpretation
The street is so full that it is hard to see the cobbles. Hundreds of people press along the front of Ferrol’s central market: women in shawls with baskets on their arms, men in caps and bowler hats, children threading between the stalls, sellers sheltering their goods under awnings and umbrellas. At the far end of the street the twin bell towers of the church of San Xiao rise above the rooftops, keeping an eye on the morning’s business. This is Ferrol in 1919, as it appeared on a postcard mailed from the city to Barcelona. This first image is an interpretation, painted in loose watercolour washes; the old postcard it grew from appears further down.
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Original photograph: Photographer not named, 1919 (postcard published by Papelería de El Correo Gallego, printed in Berlin by Julius Nagelschmidt; restored and colourised, also available as a print)
Interpretation: Sapiens Verbum
Subject: A crowd in the street outside Ferrol’s central market, with the bell tower of the church of San Xiao behind
Location: Mercado da Magdalena, Ferrol, A Coruña, Galicia, Spain
Medium: 1919 photogravure postcard, restored and colourised, and a watercolour interpretation of the same view
Series: Ferrol
The watercolour keeps the postcard’s long view down the street and fills it with colour and noise. The stone fronts on the left glow in a warm, early light, with flowers spilling from the balconies. On the right the market hall becomes a tall shed of green-painted ironwork and glass over a brick base, its roof a sweep of terracotta. The crowd turns into a moving pattern of dark coats, white headscarves, straw hats and splashes of red and blue, and the towers of San Xiao stand pale against a sky of soft clouds. It is the same street on the same busy morning, seen as if the colour had never been taken out of it.
Market day in a naval city
In 1919 Ferrol lived by and for its shipyards. The Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval had taken over the yard in 1909, and in the years before this postcard it had launched Spain’s first dreadnought battleships there: the España in 1912, the Alfonso XIII in 1913 and the Jaime I in 1914, although wartime shortages of British materials delayed the last of them until 1921. All those workers, sailors and their families had to eat, and the central market, a few streets from the walls of the Arsenal, was where the city came to buy.
The market stood in the heart of A Magdalena, the district laid out in the eighteenth century for the growing naval city: six long parallel streets crossed by nine shorter ones, in a grid of identical blocks with a square at each end. The old central market was made up of iron pavilions by Manuel Riva y de Soto, who had been in charge of the city’s works in the late nineteenth century; they have long since disappeared. Fish was still sold inside the general market, which the local paper had complained in 1909 was too small for the city’s needs. A separate fish hall had been designed by Rodolfo Ucha as early as 1910, but its first stone was not laid until November 1922 and it only opened on 1 December 1925.
The towers of San Xiao
The towers in the background belong to the church of San Xiao (San Julián), dedicated to the patron saint of Ferrol. It was designed by the naval engineer and architect Julián Sánchez Bort, who finished his plans in 1763, basing his design on the church of San Andrés Avelino in Rome. Building began after royal approval in 1765, and the first Mass was celebrated in 1772. The church replaced the old medieval parish church in Ferrol Vello, condemned by the works on the Arsenal’s moat. Its two matching towers of dressed stone have domed tops, pinnacles, crosses and weathervanes, and in 1959 it became the co-cathedral of the diocese of Mondoñedo-Ferrol.
The photograph behind it
The source is a postcard titled Ferrol. Mercado central, published in 1919 by the stationery shop of El Correo Gallego, the newspaper founded in Ferrol in 1878, and printed in Berlin by Julius Nagelschmidt. It is a photogravure of about 14 by 9 centimetres, and the photographer is not named. This copy was written on and sent through the post from Ferrol to Barcelona, still with its stamp and postmark. The card is preserved by the Biblioteca de Galicia (shelfmark POS 505) and can be seen in its digital library, Galiciana, where it is catalogued as a public-domain work. Its description sums up the scene: the market in Ferrol, a large group of people in the street and the bell tower of San Xiao in the background.
Below is that photograph, restored and colourised so that the scene reads as it might have looked on the day: the same long view down the street, the same crowd packed between the houses and the market hall, the stalls and baskets along the kerb, and the towers of San Xiao closing the view. The interpretation above keeps the postcard’s street, crowd and towers, and changes the colour, the light and the touch.
Visiting the market today
The Mercado da Magdalena is still Ferrol’s market, on the same site beside the co-cathedral. The iron pavilions of 1919 have gone: today’s main market hall opened on 17 April 2000. Next to it stands Ucha’s fish hall, the Pescadería, a modernist pavilion of iron, glass and zinc with the date 1923 above its doors, restored in the early 2000s and still selling fresh fish and shellfish. Come on a Tuesday, Thursday or Friday morning, when the stalls are busiest, then walk across to San Xiao, look back along the street and picture it packed with shawls, baskets and caps, as it was on the day this card was printed.
See more of Ferrol in motion
Our travel channel has walked the streets of Ferrol:
For the shipyards that kept this city busy, see the Ferrol estuary at dusk, with its shipyards and bridge, and for the whole ría from above, Ferrol’s ría at sunset from Monte Ancos. Another crowd from the same years fills Praza do Conde in Pontedeume for the Tree Festival, c. 1914.
Bring the bustle of Ferrol’s market in 1919 to your wall. Both versions of this scene, the watercolour interpretation and the restored original photograph, are available as museum-quality prints, canvas or posters, and both can also be licensed for your own project.
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See the Mercado da Magdalena on Google Maps
Part of the Ferrol series.
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