Some buildings in Barcelona have a healthy habit: displaying their year of construction. It's healthy especially for observers and flâneurs who can answer a frequent question at a glance, "When was it built?". In the case of hotels, there are some examples: the Majestic displayed it for twelve months upon its centenary, with large luminous letters: 1918-2018. The Palace permanently recalls it at the top of its facade: "Any 1919".
There is a third hotel that also displays its opening year in a clearly visible place: the marquee. It also indicates that it is older than the two establishments mentioned, as its year is 1917. This is the Hotel Regina, protagonist of chapter 21 of Hotels with History, the series we publish every 15 days in The New Barcelona Post. This central hotel holds in its halls a story that was about to change the course of Barça, although we'll leave that for later.
A street that remembers an embrace
Before entering the hotel, it's worth stopping on the street. Bergara is a short street, a 160-meter parenthesis between Plaça de Catalunya and Pelai, which seems to exist only to connect two larger arteries. However, it bears a name with weight. The city named it in memory of the Convention of Vergara of 1839, the armistice that ended the First Carlist War: two enemy generals embracing before the troops gathered in the fields of Vergara (Bergara, in Catalan). A theatrical and necessary gesture. The war was ending, and everyone needed to see it. It was on that street, at number 4, where Francisco Recasens would build one of the city's longest-standing hotels decades later.
Nine pesetas and ten cents
The story of the Regina begins in Valls, Tarragona. Recasens was born there, and he arrived in Barcelona with nine pesetas and ten cents in his pocket, in addition to great determination. After years of hard work in the transport sector, he managed to acquire the Pensión Francesa by gathering 5,500 pesetas (a fortune at the time) and even borrowed the last 1,000 from his former boss to complete the purchase.
What followed was almost a curse. Less than two months after the acquisition, the Setmana Tràgica (Tragic Week) erupted, the popular revolt that paralyzed Barcelona in July 1909, and given how complicated it was to live with a social outburst, Recasens personally went to the train stations to pick up his precious guests to keep the business afloat.
1917: the marquee, the elevator, and the telephone
In 1917, the Pensión Francesa was transformed into the Hotel Regina. This quickly became a reference address for travelers looking for a good place to rest in the city: it was one of the first establishments in the city to offer an elevator, telephone in the rooms, and private bathrooms in half of them. Innovations that today seem obvious and that then were powerful attractions.
From that foundational moment, pieces remain that the hotel preserves as cherished heritage. The original marquee is a wrought iron and leaded glass structure with naturalistic decoration that is included in the Ruta del Modernisme de Barcelona. Its stained glass windows are polychrome, the work of French artist René Beauclair, and it is where the aforementioned opening year and the founder's initials FR are located. Many people believe that these letters have to do with a supposed French origin of the property, and nothing could be further from the truth. The art deco style spiral staircase still presides over the interior, and the Century Suite, which occupies what was an old ballroom, today preserves the original columns and floor from the early 20th century.
The Exhibition, the war, and exile
In 1929, taking advantage of the increase in visitors for the International Exhibition, Recasens bought the adjoining apartment block, significantly expanding the hotel's capacity and serving more than 300 meals daily. The Regina was already one of the city's reference establishments.
However, in 1936 the Civil War arrived. Recasens fled to Italy and the hotel was left in the hands of its workers, who converted it into a refuge and improvised hospital: the halls where guests and bourgeoisie spent hours of leisure welcomed displaced people. Among them, for a time, the so-called Children of Morelia, the children who ended up exiled to Mexico, and the establishment survived the war as best it could. When its owner regained control, he spent years trying to rescue the works of art and architectural pieces that had disappeared.
The halls where Di Stéfano was lost
It was precisely in those same halls, already in the 1950s, where the Regina starred in one of the most painful episodes in the history of F.C. Barcelona, although at that time no one knew exactly what was at stake. The legendary Alfredo Di Stéfano stayed at the Regina while Barça and Real Madrid disputed his signing after his years playing in Argentina and Colombia. The hotel's halls witnessed the tug-of-war between executives, until the Argentine headed to Madrid. From Bergara street, Barcelona watched the best football player of those times leave.
The Roigs: the saga that inherited everything
In 1967 the hotel was transferred to the newly created Pulitzer Group, of the Roig family. The current general director, Luis Roig, remembers when as a child he played with his brother Javier on the different floors of the establishment, which are now part of a hotel group with interests in Barcelona and Paris.
In 2024, the Regina culminated its latest renovation, a work by the WIT studio: renovated rooms, an interior patio converted into a cafeteria, and the group's B Corp certification as a contemporary gesture of a house that has been reading the times for over a century. The balance between old and new that Recasens never imagined, although perhaps he would later have recognized it as his own.
Above the entrance, the wrought iron canopy still shines. The initials FR and the year 1917 in leaded glass, intact. The Majestic turned off its centenary lights long ago, and the Palace still shows its "Any 1919" to whoever looks up. However, it is the Regina, the most discreet and the oldest of the three, that still signs the door of Bergara street every night with the initials of a man who arrived in Barcelona with nine pesetas in his pocket.