Without the current road communications, at the beginning of the last century there were many towns that were so far from the regional capitals or large towns that the subsistence economy was their only option for self-sufficiency. Vegetables from the garden and cereals from the field, meats from their own breeding, a community wood oven and small businesses was everything that, basically, ensured what was necessary for its neighbors.
The village stores served the rest, a complete range of products, many of them first in bulk, and little by little, packaged and promoted with the first branding and labeling designs. Some of them still appear in old newspapers kept in old trunks of some attics in country houses, also in museum showcases.
Facade of a grocery store.
At the gates of the Lleida Pyrenees, the town of Salàs de Pallars has recreated, with all the authenticity of the moment, the time when small town shops were everything to stock up.
Salàs did not want to let die, nor send those establishments to oblivion and the spirit of what they stood for for many families throughout the geography. He has faithfully recreated them, so now going into them is like put your feet in a three-dimensional photograph and, when leaving, feel something like what Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) experienced in the movie Back to the Future after each trip to the past.
Halls of Pallars.
CHARMING ROUTE
The route through the old commerce in Salàs begins in the Plaza del Mercat, which has a special charm for its stone porches and arcades, that leads us to walk under their houses, under roofs built with wooden beams.
The first establishment in which we travel to the past is the Café Salón. In his atrezzo of then we will see a pool table, a table football, and the pinball, the machine that tested reflexes with a small pellet that dodged the twists and turns of the network of lights and sounds. The bar with its beer shooters, the small marble tables, chairs and wooden beams are also part of that space that It was a meeting point every day for the neighbors, mostly men. In the walls, plates with advertisements of the time help to recreate more of its atmosphere.
Cafe Lounge.
then we can enter the pond. Tobacco was dispatched there, while the post and telegraph service was offered. In the pharmacy, the shelves coexist with glass jars that stored master formulas to cure certain ailments, medicinal plants from the environment, prepared to cure and old medicine boxes They stopped circulating a long time ago.
We will also find the door open the grocery store and colonial, that already by its name indicates the origin of some of the articles that were dispatched in this type of establishments.
As you progress in this itinerary through the old shops of the town, we realize everything that is worth rescuing, to know where we come from, how our ancestors lived, how they managed without everything we have today, and with what products they were made. Men and women, without internet, with very few means of communication and transportation, they lived and were deluded with that, and nothing more.
Barbershop.
TO THE RESCUE OF MEMORY
A history teacher well remembered by his students, born in Salàs de Pallars in 1953, is the architect of that rescue of memory, the review of the old town trade. His parents ran a bakery and a grocery store in Salàs, the businesses they had inherited from Sisco's paternal grandparents. And 30 years ago, when they retired, they gave him the shelves of both establishments.
Sisco placed them in the garage of his house, to which, from time to time, he began to Bring other items from old stores that were closing. And he was seeing that all that could be part of a plot thread to tell what those shops were like and, with it, also a little about what life was like for his neighbors. He used his savings of 25 years to recreate several stores with period props: the kiosk, the printing press, the haberdashery, the barbershop...
Sisco Farras.
It has been a meticulous search for articles, at fairs and antique stores, and also on the Internet, to do not forget a single detail that tells the story of this type of store.
The Center d'Interpretació de l'Antic Comerç (CIAC) covers, with the visit to these eight businesses, about 70 years of history, but about which you can walk and talk. And recreate to look and imagine how they surprised the first advertising posters, back in the 1970s, when the marks appeared. As Farràs had read somewhere, those shops were the museums of the poor, for all the art that the first label designs showed. All of this is explained in the Guided visit to the different shops.
Printing.
PERFUME AND INK
In the space designed to recreate the printing press, we will see the type of machinery with which typesetters and typographers composed texts, reviewing the history of printing, since its invention by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century. The corsets and girdles in which the women were sheathed, we discover them in the haberdashery, and the razors and perfumes with which the men groomed themselves, in the barber's.
They are pieces of daily life to discover in this Pyrenean town, the story told as Sisco Farràs had always done in his history classes, at the Tremp and La Pobla de Segur institutes, where he was a teacher. He used objects that he brought to the classroom to explain anecdotes that approximated more and better the understanding of each topic.
Perfumery.
Salàs today has a population of just under 400 inhabitants. Before 1900 it had tripled that figure. But that interesting and attractive recreation of the old trade has placed the town in the destination of many tourists, groups, families and individuals who combine excursions and visits to the surroundings, the Pallars Jussà region, with this peculiar trip to the emotions through the old commerce.