Josep Brugal and the modernization of La Seu d’Urgell and Andorra

Josep Brugal i Fortuny, son of a veterinarian from Vilafranca del Penedès, showed early talent for drawing and an interest in engineering. He studied architecture at the University of Barcelona and earned his degree before the Spanish Civil War. During the war he served in the engineers corps of the Republican army; after the conflict he had to return to university to revalidate his degree under the new Franco regime in order to take on commissions such as the restoration of the basilica of Santa Maria de Vilafranca.

Shortly before 1949, a close friend of his father, Dr. Pal — a member of the family that owned the Banys de Sant Vicenç and practicing as an ophthalmologist in Barcelona — contacted Brugal with an ambitious project. Dr. Xavier Maestre, from the Cal Molines family of Andorra la Vella, wanted to build a new family residence in La Seu d’Urgell. Wealthy Andorran notables often maintained secondary homes in La Seu to complement their ancestral houses in the valleys, and Maestre’s commission brought Brugal to the town.

For a Barcelona architect in the postwar years, working in La Seu felt remote. Lluís Brugal, Josep’s son, recalls accompanying his father in a battered Ford, passing Civil Guard checkpoints and watching the slow progress of the Oliana reservoir works as they traveled. The family would stay through the summer, sharing the Maestre family apartment on the Passeig.

At the time, the Eixample expansion of La Seu projected two decades earlier by Joan Bergós had barely progressed; beyond the historic centre lay gardens and hay meadows where cows grazed. Maestre’s house was planned for this immediate periphery. Set in a garden, it would be generously sized, use granite for moldings and corners, and be crowned by a tower with a pyramidal roof intended to signal the owner’s means. A lower building within the same plot was to house a garage — Maestre was one of the few locals with a private car — and a private medical practice open to the townspeople. The ensemble would be clad with granite plates in a manner recalling the style introduced by Cèsar Martinell in early‑20th‑century Andorra, a connection noted by Enric Dilmé in his recent study of the last 150 years of Andorran architecture.

The Maestre commission opened doors for Brugal in both La Seu and Andorra. In La Seu he took on projects including the church of Santa Magdalena, the Hotel Nice and the house of Josep Núñez Pallerola. In Andorra he worked on the extension of the church of Sant Esteve, the Vilanova clinic, the urbanization of Plaça Rebés and, together with Adolf Florensa, the Caixa de Pensions building on the same square, whose tower closely resembles that of Cal Molines in La Seu.

These interventions in Andorra helped make Brugal one of the pioneers of the modernization of the Principality’s urban fabric. Many of these details and more were presented recently by Núria Gascón Moliné, a student at Institut Joan Brudieu, as part of her baccalaureate research project.