stolen art WW2: Cassirers, Camille Pissarro

 

Camille Pissarro, 1897

Rue St Honoré, Après-Midi, Effet de Pluie

Wiki

Millions of European Jews were forced to quickly sell their hom­es and businesses with WW2, their assets being confiscated by the Nazis. Works of art often seemed very significant to war heirs; they represented a last cultural conn­ect­­ion to their dead families. I particularly thank Marilyn Henry.

Sadly there had been an intentional campaign of con­fis­cation and destruction of European cultural prop­er­ty. Post-war, Allied Forces uncovered cac­h­es of looted goods and the U.S military returned mill­ions of art objects to the countries of the works’ origin. But those nat­ions were responsible for locating the actual heirs. Did they find them?

Once the Nazis sold the objects, the works entered the art market and were dispersed. Both the pre-war owner and the current owner may have had moral claims to the works, but legal ownership varied. Most Western legal sys­t­ems couldn’t deal with losses from other decades, and from oth­er coun­tries. Claims could be barred because Statutes of Lim­it­at­ion expired. Or claims and the rights of a curr­ent possessor were con­fused when art crossed borders. Add­ition­ally most nations had laws that protected good-faith pur­ch­as­ers. And who could define a forced sale? Only Germany recog­nis­ed some sales under duress.

In the U.S, most museums are private so ownership disputes were and are civil matters. The New York State Banking Dept estab­lish­ed its Hol­ocaust Claims Processing Office in 1997, to resolve claims without litigation. Since then, it accepted 142 art claims covering 25,000 objects. But the small staff of lawyers, linguists and hist­orians only secured the VERY slow return of 12 art works!

Camille Pissarro, 1897, Wiki

Boulevard Montmartre, Morning, Cloudy Weather

NGV Melbourne

Also in the U.S, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal created a database linked to American museums, identifying thousands of items that had been in Europe from 1933-45. But while the portal could be searched by an artist’s name, country of origin and a painting’s name, it could not be searched by the family own­er.

An artwork’s ownership chain was often patchy. There WAS a res­ponsibility to participate in provenance research, but it was exp­ensive. The paper trail about prov­enance history was often deposited in: multi-national settings, private family memorabilia, govern­mental or museum arch­iv­es.

Some museums did no additional research to clarify the history, until a claimant came forward. Others eg North Carolina Museum of Art, took the initiative. Artworks with uncertain gaps of war-time ownership were reviewed by prof­essional provenance research­ers.

Museums and collectors are more willing to acknowledge legitimate claims than they were a decade ago, and to settle them without lit­ig­ation. But of course museums and collectors still dispute ten­uous claims. Most museums have put their entire collections on Web sites so now the assertion of claims is much easier than it was.

The size of wartime art thefts will never be known. The size of their return, through some heroic post-war efforts, was very great. But those efforts were eventually seen as incon­sistent with foreign policy, or reflecting cold war ten­s­ions by the 1960s. Only West Germany paid partial com­p­en­sation to some claim­ants; read Nazi Confiscated Art Issues.

Camille Pissarro, 1897

Boulevard Montmartre Spring
Courtauld Institute of Art

These days attention to war-era ownership is emerging in the art wor­ld. Major auction houses and museums have provenance re­search­ers, so sellers and buyers routinely check objects with the Art Loss Reg­is­ter - an international database of lost and stolen art formed in 1991 by auction houses and art traders. Un­for­t­unately this did not happen 50 years ago.. when scrutiny could have helped.

As more artwork is identified and located, other nations are quest­ioning the ownership of their holdings. A number of European count­ries eg Austria and Britain have enacted restitut­ion policies or established independent panels to review claims. However these re­view processes didn’t ensure the recovery of loot­ed art, even with clear evidence. Many claimants, especially the children whose parents died in the Holocaust, continued to be frustrated at the expense and time required to pursue a work.   

The same Pissarro painting in Lilly Cassirer’s Berlin flat, c1930.

artnet news

There were 15 Camille Pissarros (1830–1903) that were painted from his Paris hotel room window. One version was called Boulevard Mont­martre, spring morning,  moved through the hands of two of my favourite art dealers: Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris who acq­uired it from the art­ist in June 1898; and Paul Cassirer in Berl­in who acquired it from Durand-Ruel in Oct 1902.

Now consider Lilly Cassirer and her second husband Otto Neubauer, who swapped a beautiful Camille Pissarro impressionist painting for their free­d­om. A Nazi-appointed appraiser forced her to sell Rue St Honoré, Après-Midi, Effet de Pluie for $360 then. But when the coup­le fled Munich in 1939, they could not take the funds. Lil­ly’s first husb­and Fritz Cassirer, from the prom­inent German Jewish family of publishers and art dealers, had bought the painting from Pissarro’s agent in 1900.

Although the post-war German government voided the sale, Lilly nev­er re­covered the Pissarro. It was sold multiple times. In 1993, the Sp­anish government paid $350 million for the col­lection of industr­ialist-Nazi supp­ort­er Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and placed in their Museum.

In 2001 in the US, grandson Claude Cassirer (1921-2010) found the painting after years of searching and spent five years trying to recover the Pissarro through diplomatic channels. Finally Claude filed a federal lawsuit in California against Spain and against Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation to recover the paint­ing, now worth $40mill.   

Lilly Cassirer Neubauer and her beloved heir grandson Claude, born Berlin 1921

Claude's mother died flu 1921; Claude's grandmother loved and raised the child

itsartlaw

Claude Cassirer learned the painting was at the Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2000 and petitioned Spain and the museum to return it. See the legal proceedings: the District Court case was in 2006, the first appeal was 2009-10, the second appeal was 2013, the Spanish Law case was 2015 and a last decision was in 2019. Whose law should app­ly, Spain’s or the USA’s? In 2024 the U.S Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit awarded the painting to the Spanish museum; it was legally bound to decide the case using Spanish law because the thefts occurred there. The Cassirers appealed the 9th Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court which vacated the Circuit Court of Appeals decision. It will now have to reconsider the case in light of the new California law on holocaust survivors' right to reclaim looted art.

Catholics killed heretics; Protestants killed witches

Heresies

Catholic Answers

The Inquisition was set up in the Catholic Church to root out & punish heresy. In 1184 Pope Lucius III sent bishops to southern France to track down Cathar heretics. In 1231 Pope Gregory officially charged the Dominican & Franciscan Orders with hunting heretics. Then in the C14th, the church pursued the Waldensians in Germany and Northern Italy.

Inquisitors moved into a town and announced their arrival, giving citizens a chance to admit to heresy. Those who confessed were forced to testify and received a punishment. If the heretic did not confess, torture and execution were inescapable. Heretics weren’t allowed to face accusers and received no counsel. The Inquisitors, on the other hand, were supported with a manual called “Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity”.

Nonetheless there were many abuses of power. In 1307 Inquisitors were involved in the mass arrest and tortures of 15,000 Knights Templar in France, resulting in many executions. Joan of Arc was also burned at the stake in 1431 by this Inquisition.

In the late C15th, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain believed corruption in the Spanish Catholic Church was caused by Jews who, to survive increasing anti-Semitism, converted to Christianity. These Conversos were viewed with suspicion and were blamed for plagues, accused of poisoning peoples’ water and abducting Christian children.

Auto de fé, final, public stage for punishing religious heretics.
Jan Hus at the stake, 1485
FreeSpeechHistory

The 2 monarchs believed Conversos were secretly practising their old religion;  and that Christian support would be crucial for their upcoming crusade in Muslim Granada. King Ferdinand felt an Inquisition was the best way to fund that crusade, by seizing the wealth of heretic Conversos.

In 1478, urged by clergyman Tomas de Torquemada, the two monarchs created the Tribunal of Castile to investigate heresy among Conversos. The effort at first focused on stronger Catholic education for Conversos, but by 1480, Jews in Castile were forced into isolated and locked up ghettos. The Inquisition expanded to Seville and a mass exodus of Conversos followed. In 1481, 20,000 Conversos confessed to heresy, hoping to avoid execution. But by the year’s end, hundreds of Conversos were burned at the stake.

Hearing the complaints of Conversos who had fled to Rome, Pope Sextus stated that the Spanish Inquisition was wrongly accusing Conversos. In 1482 Sextus appointed a council to take command of the Inquisition, but the same Torquemada was named Inquisitor Gen­eral and established courts across Spain. Torture became systemised and routinely used to elicit confessions. Sent­encing of confessed heretics was done in a public event called the Auto-da-Fe. Torque­mada’s downfall came only when he investigated members of the clergy for heresy. Diego de Deza took over as Inquisitor General, escalating the hunt for heresy within cities and rounding up scores of accused heretics, including members of the nobility and local governments. Some were able to bribe their way out of imprisonment.

After Isabella’s death in 1504, Ferdinand promoted Cardinal Gonzalo Ximenes de Cisneros, head of the Spanish Catholic Church, to In­qu­is­itor General. Ximenes had previously been successful in pers­ecuting Islamic Moors in in Granada. As Inquisitor General, Ximenes pursued Muslims into North Africa, encouraging the king to take military action and to establish the Inquisition there.

The Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517 and the Reformation began.  Rome renewed its own Inquisition in 1542 when Pope Paul III created the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition to combat Protestant heresy!! And in 1545, the Spanish Index was created, a list of heretical European books forbidden in Spain, based on the Roman Inquisition’s own index.

The popul­at­ion of Spanish Protestants increased, particularly in the 1550s. In 1556, King Philip II ascended the Spanish throne - he had previously brought the Roman Inquisition to the Netherlands, where Lutherans had been hunted and burned at the stake. Although origin­al­ly organised to deal only with Jews and Moors, The Spanish Inquisition now had to widen out to include Protestant heretics.

As Spain expanded into the Americas, so did the New World Inquis­it­ion; it was established in Mexico in 1570 and in 1574 in Peru. In 1580 Spain conquered Portugal, and began rounding up and kill­ing Jews and Protestants who had fled Spain. Philip II also renewed hostilities against the Moors, selling them into slavery. 

A late witch trial in Protestant Europe in Paisley, near Glasgow, 1697.
Amusing Planet

Witch-hunts were completely different. They started only after the Reformation in majority-Protestant countries, with the num­ber of cases increasing in the later C16th. At the very same time in Catholic countries in southern Europe, there were almost no witch trials because they were banned by the Catholic Church. As a result the Spanish killed only a handful of witches, the Portuguese just one and the Italians none at all. 

So the witch-craze focused on Protestant northern Europe, in countries like Germany, France and Scotland. Presumably in those countries witchcraft was seen as a remnant of ignorant Catholic beliefs that needed to be eradicated. 

Witchcraft and heresy were thus inversely related: as witchcraft trials were on the rise in Protestant countries, large-scale heresy trials rapidly decreased. In Scotland there were large-scale witch-hunts in 1590, 1597, the 1620s and 1649. Was witchcraft merely an alternative way of accusing heretics, without calling it heresy? 

Even in majority Protestant populations, there were regional differences. In places like Russia and Estonia the majority of executed witches were men (68%), not women (32%). In Germany the vast majority of executed witches were women (82%).  Did Eastern Europe communities have different views of women? And witch prosecutions in the Protestant Low Countries had almost ended by 1578, many decades before they died out in Germany and Scotland. 

Where the Catholic Church was strong (Spain, Portugal, Italy), the Reformation was definitely the first time that the church had to cope with a large-scale threat to its existence and legitimacy. The Spanish Inquisition was so busy executing c32,000 religious heretics in 200+ years that they didn’t have the time or the need to go after witches. 

In 150 years in Protestant countries, c80,000 people were tried for witch­craft and c40,000 of them were executed. Only after 1700 did witch trials disappear, almost completely, in Protestant communities. 

Gertrude Stein & friends: life in art.

Gertrude Stein at her salon, 1920

Invaluable

Baby Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English well. Her father moved them back to USA in 1879 but died in 1891, so older brother Michael supported them. Brother Leo moved back to Europe, immersing himself in art and in 1903 Gertrude also returned to Paris, sharing a left bank art studio. Michael sent money each month, making their bohemian life-style sustainable.

Thus Rue de Fleurus became the first permanent home for the Steins, with Gertrude remaining there for 40 years. They provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris, inspiring, supporting and buying art. Their home became a salon, where art works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin and Cezanne shone. Saturday evenings enabled young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable art collection in their salon.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

 1923 

How did Leo & Gertrude become so learned about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy a work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson welcomed and taught the Steins in Florence. In 1905 the siblings saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse, just when avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s informal art gallery. The first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background! Then they bought some Renoirs, 2 Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and Cézanne water colours. The friendship with Matisse cooled only when Gertrude developed a greater interest in Picasso. Fortunately Michael Stein continued to collect Matisse.

Etta and Claribel Cone were wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimoreans who inherited vast wealth in their 20s. The Steins and Cones travelled to Florence in 1905 where Berenson introduced the Cones to Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck’s art. The Steins took Etta to Picasso’s studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and she urged Etta to buy Picasso drawings.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905-6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his Seine flat, and both sisters bought as many works as they could. Gertrude also sold the Cones some of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a Stein salon group portrait by Marie Laurencin.

In the US, Harriet Lane Levy (1867–1950) had been a popular journalist in San Francisco. She’d already visited Paris before, the first being with her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. But this time she sailed to Paris with friend Alice B Toklas. They arrived in Paris in 1907, living together until Toklas met Gertrude Stein.

Toklas was invited to a weekend party at Steins’. She was besotted, soon becoming a regular visitor and going to the galleries with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into rue de Fleurus home and became Gertrude's right hand woman, reader, critic, typist and publication handler! She was Stein’s lover & assistant for ever!

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By then Stieglitz knew the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne well, and began to negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their huge collection. Other young modernist painters joined in eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay and Guillaume Apollinaire.

New Eastern Europe Jewish artists arrived in Paris from 1904 on. Starving in their Paris garrets, Steins’ salons filled with food-drink were much appreciated. The Americans were all secularist Jews, but they wanted to help the Jewish artists, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani. The fact that the Steins, Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas spoke Yiddish or German from home must have helped the lads integrate.

Levy returned to the US in 1910, at 43, and lived her life collecting and art philanthropy. We know which artists Harriet patronised in Paris and which paintings she bought in the USA, because she became a very important benefactor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. See Derain’s Paysage du midi 1906; Matisse’s Corsican Landscape 1899 and La Table au café c1899; and Pablo Picasso’s Scène de rue 1900.

Readers will love Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Their Circle by Harriet Lane Levy, 2011.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was keen to link her status with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris visited in 1910s, finding Stein accepted the more radical art styles that others quickly rejected. But a family rupture followed. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a Cubist fan. Gertrude and Alice visited Picasso’s studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the work that marked the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912 Leo took the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes to Italy, permanently! NB the Steins had established the first Museum of Modern Art at rue de Fleurus but the salon wound down with Leo leaving and war breaking out in 1914.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel Cone rented a large flat in Etta’s building and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. This excellent Cone collection entered the Baltimore Museum of Art when Claribel died in 1929.

27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris

Note the plaque, next to the door

Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The Stein collection had been constantly divided among relatives, friends, dealers and collectors, making it difficult to track. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein collection and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large, early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I’m sure the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, more so than collectors. The 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important paintings for the first time since pre-WW1 Paris.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, 2025. Wade wanted to uncover the woman behind the celebrity, as cultivated by Stein herself. But it was this very celebrity that eclipse her work. Wade found new archive material to shed more light on Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and on the origins of her undeniably radical writing.

Wade examined the creation of the Stein myth eg posing for Picasso's portrait; central to Bohemian Parisian life hosting people eg Matisse & Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with Alice Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography. But admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she begged Toklas to secure her place in literary history. Using unseen material, Wade uncovered the origins of Stein's radical writing, the real Gertrude Stein as she was when alone.

Medieval travellers were quite like us

 Our perception of medieval Europe is of a confined world in which people rarely travelled beyond their own locality, and when they did it was for religious reasons. But Paul Oldfield asked us to consider Southern Italy and Sic­ily. Due to its central Mediterranean location, the region began to at­tract more European visitors for three main reasons:

Canterbury Tales

Amazon

Firstly various factors converged to boost the popularity of distant pilgrimage. After the crus­ading movement started in 1095, Europe experienced its golden era of devotional trav­el to Jerusalem. Pilgrimage offered the best med­ieval equiv­al­ent of the modern tourist trade, even though some pilgrims travelled not solely for pious motivations eg a crusade might have cloaked political and economic agendas.

Secondly South­ern Italy and Sicily were conquered by bands of Normans who unified a region which had previously been polit­ically frag­ment­ed (eg Greek Christians, Latin Christians, Jews and Mus­lims). By 1130 the Normans had created a powerful new mon­archy which had been domin­at­ed by Muslim sea-power.

Thirdly Europe underwent a cultural renaissance so learn­ed ind­ividuals travelled to seek clas­sical traditions. South­ern Italy and Sicily, with clas­sical history and with a Greek and Islamic past, attracted both an­cient & eastern learning.

The result of these three combined strands saw an influx of visit­ors who could properly be called tour­ists. High numbers of people regularly travelled both short and long distances, and some of this move­ment was driven by modern motivations: renewal, leisure and thrill-seeking.

While the pilgrims were travelling across foreign lands, they were encouraged to imitate Christ, to feel hardship and to focus on salvation. At many shrines en route, pil­g­rims could stay near a holy tomb, to receive cures or divine rev­el­ations. Even pilgrims were exper­ient­ial travellers.

South Italy possessed one of medieval Europe’s more sophist­ic­ated travel infrastruc­tures. Being so close to the heart of the former Roman empire, it still boasted functioning Roman roads which linked into the main route - it brought travel­l­ers from western Europe across the Alps to Rome. Via Appia helped travellers to move across the south Italian Ap­en­nines to the coastal ports of Apulia, while another road went via Calabria towards the bustling Messina port.

South Italian ports hosted fleets of local ships as well as those of the emerging commercial powers of Genoa, Pisa and Venice. So the pilgrim had secure, effic­ient and direct connections. At the same time, new hospitals, inns, bridges and monasteries emerged along It­aly’s main pilgrim routes, or near shrines for foreign vis­it­ors. The major Apulian and Sicilian ports often hosted pilgrim hospit­als belonging to Holy Land military monastic orders, Templars and Hospitallers. Mes­s­ina was a particularly hectic port.

 

Pilgrim badge bought at

shrine at Saint-Josse-sur-Mer, France

Pinterest

Most of the surviving evidence focuses on elite travellers – nobles and bishops. But travel, and pilgrimage in particular, was also undertaken by the very poorest. Monastic rules out­lined their monks’ duty to offer free hospitality to all trav­ellers. It was also good advertising for shrine centres to be seen to cater for all backgrounds. After all, foreign visit­ors spent money on local serv­ices and on profitable tolls. The guardians of southern Italy’s shrine centres actively competed for travellers.

Many pilgrims suffered from debilitating conditions, and struggled to cope with travelling demands. Many died. One chronicler of the First Crusade saw the drowning of 400 pilgrims in Brindisi harbour but, he said, dying as a pilgrim brought the hope of salvation. Of course threats of robbery, shipwreck and dis­ease remained - no wonder pilgrims travelled in groups. It makes sense that the word travel comes from ancient word travail, meaning hardship.

Southern Italy’s landscape drew wonder and fear. Its seas in the busy Straits of Mess­ina were full of tidal rips. Muslim travellers suffered a near-fatal shipwreck in the Straits in the 1180s. The famous 1280 map, Hereford Mappa Mundi, por­t­rayed two sea monsters lurking in Sicilian waters.

Erupt­ions at Vesuvius and Etna were a regul­ar feature: one struck at Catania Sicily in 1169 killing 15,000 people. The region’s volcanoes had even greater potency, connecting them to Hell’s Entrance and showing God’s disapproval.

In c1170 a Spanish Jewish traveller and author, Benjamin of Tudela, pas­s­ed near Naples and marvelled at the sight of an ancient city submerged just off the coast. Like many travellers, he came there to access cutting-edge medical knowl­ed­ge, a fusion of Arabic and ancient Greek learning that had been a specialty in Salerno.

To prove that travellers had been to the distant city they had aimed for, each would buy a badge to show off back at home. Typically made of lead alloy, the badges were sold as souven­irs at Christian pilgrimage sites and related to the part­ic­ular saint ven­er­ated there. The shrine at Saint-Josse-sur-Mer in France was named after a hermit, St Jos, in a monastery. His hermitage became a popular site for late C14th English pilgrims on the way to more distant shrines.

In the most appealing and popular sites across Europe (Jerusalem in Is­rael, Compost­ela in Spain, Canterbury in Eng­land, Cologne in Germany etc) the badges tended to be standardised eg St Thomas Becket was the most popular sub­ject in Canberbury and a shell was sold most frequently in Compostela.

Hereford Mappa Mundi

map created in 1280.

Media Storehouse

Conclusion 
Medieval travellers displayed traits that reflected aspects of our modern understanding of tourism. Southern Italy was an alluring travel hotspot - it had devel­oped travel and serv­ice structures, it catered for those seek­ing spiritual salvat­ion, it provided learning and tested those who sought chall­enges. Those challenges were often sought as ends in them­selves.

Churchmen sparked Lisbon's pogrom in 1506

Jews had inhabited Iberia for centuries. By the 1400s, Old Jews were thriving in Portugal’s best trading, commercial and intell­ectual cen­tres. It was only when Spain’s Queen Isabella & King Ferdinand decreed the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, some 100,000 Jews fled to neighbouring Port­ugal.

St. Dominic's Church, Lisbon

facing Rossio Square

Portugal’s King Manuel I came to the throne in 1495 and set about establishing himself as one of the great patrons of the Portuguese Renaissance. However things changed when Manuel begged to marry King Ferdinand’s daught­er. The Spanish monarch would approve, providing Por­tugal expel­led its Jews! In Dec 1496, Manuel promptly complied. He dec­reed that all Jews must convert to Catholicism or leave the count­ry, in order to placate his future in-laws, Spain’s Catholic Mon­ar­chs. 

King Manuel issued two decrees: 

A] in 1496, edict of expul­sion from Portugal (when the lucky Jews escaped to Amsterdam, Germany, Italy, France, Morocco, Constantinople, Brasil and Peru) and 

B] in 1497, the forced conversion edict. The 1497 Edict blocked Port­ug­uese Jews from emigrating and were they too were forcibly converted to Christ­ian­ity. The Portuguese Jews who’d been forcibly baptised in the 1497 mass con­ver­sion were called New Christians or Conversos. 

In the early 1500s, drought and plague swept through Portugal, food prices inevitably soared and the Church accused the Jewish merch­ants. Because Easter and Passover over­lap­ped, the Jews who were preparing Passover foods “caused” the deadly plague and drought.

During the worst of the drought in Ap 1506, the Dominican Convent attracted large crowds who were praying for relief. A light that seemed to be em­an­ating from a crucifix over the chapel altar was de­scribed as a divine sign. One New Christian asked “How can a piece of wood work wonders?” The crowd was enraged, calling his remark blasphemous, and beat him to death. His body was dismembered and burned in the square in front of the Con­vent. His protective brother was similarly killed.

 Contemporary image of the massacres by fire in Lisbon

                  

This began a 4-day massacre and burning of 2,000-4,000 Conversos. Mobs of cit­iz­ens who roamed through Lisbon, killing Jews, were in­cited by Dominican friars. They preached sermons against the Jews, shouting Death to the Jews! and Death to the Heret­ics! Other friars yelled “Destroy this abominable people!” Who did they mean, the old Jews or the New Christians?

Citizens followed the fanatical chur­ch­men through the city streets and soon murdered every New Christ­ian they could find. Their bodies were dragged to the main Rossio Square and burnt in huge bonfires in front of the Domin­ican church. Not even in­fants survived the slaugh­t­er.

The next day, sailors from foreign merchant ships joined the locals in the pogroms, presumably for the purpose of robbery and not because they were angry about true Christianity.

During the massacre, royals, courtiers and aristocrats left town, if they could. The Lisbon massacre had sign­al­led a failure of King Man­uel’s policy of integration. Most of the New Christians, convert­ed to Cathol­ic­ism against their will, had remained Jewish in their homes and souls.

Upon King Manuel's return to Lisbon, he arr­ested the two Dominicans who had led the riot and had them execut­ed, along with 40-50 other conspirators. He then gave consent to all New Christians to leave Portugal, countermanding his 1497 order that forbade Conversos from emigrating. 

Ending the madness, King Manuel gave New Christians a grace period of 30 years, without persecution, to cease all Jewish practices or emigrate. King Manuel also abolished legal discrimin­at­ion against them. After that, the lives and the property of the Con­versos who stayed in Lisbon were never endangered, at least until after his death in 1521. Then the persecutions resumed.

There were 3 main contemporary sources about the pogrom:
1. The massacre sent shockwaves throughout Europe and acc­ounts of it appeared in Portuguese, Jewish, Spanish and German doc­um­ents. An anonymous German, who had been present in Lisbon and witnessed the tragedy, wrote a vivid account that was printed in several German editions: The Massacre of the New Christ­ians of Lisbon, 1506.

2 The Spanish chroniclers Andrés Bernáldez and Alonso de Santa Cruz both devoted a chapter in their works to the 1506 crisis.

3 The New Christian Isaac Ibn Faradj was present in Lisbon during the massacre. He survived and later escaped from Portugal to Otto­man Salonica where he reverted to Judaism. He wrote: ‘It happened on a Christian holiday. It was while the King and the Queen were absent from Lisbon on account of the plague which raged there at that time, that a priest with a cross stood up. Wicked men with him, murderers and scoundrels, they killed more than 1,400 New Christians, and burned their bodies, men and women, pregnant women and children. They burnt them in the streets of the city for three days on end, till the bodies were consumed and became ashes. I stole from the fire one half of the burned head of a dear friend of mine, and I hid it, kept it, brought it to Valona, and buried it in a Jew­ish cemetery. When King Manuel heard of the great wrong done to the Jews he came to Lisbon, and the priest was burnt at the stake and forty murderers hanged”.

A memorial stone was placed in Rossio Square in 2006,  

the exact site where the Jewish bodies were thrown onto bonfires.

A memorial to the victims of the Lisbon Massacre was sponsored by the Jewish community of Portugal, and erected in 2006, the 500th anniversary. A round travertine stone was bisected and a bronze Star of David was shaped into the flat surface. Translated it read: “In memory of the thousands of Jews who were victimised by intolerance and religious fanat­ic­ism, killed in the massacre that started on 19th April 1506, in this Square”. And the base had a Biblical verse.

Modern visitors to this memorial need to reflect about the death and des­truction caused by intolerance. Or perhaps read Paulo Mendes Pinto & Susana Bastos Mateus’ book The Mas­s­acre of the Jews in Lisbon, 2014. Thank you to  Lisbon LPS for the photos. 

Lisbon's beautiful palace - Ajuda

When the old royal resid­ence in what is now Praça do Comércio on Lisbon's waterfront was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755, the Portuguese king decided that it was safer to live on a hill. The chosen location was Ajuda which had been less affected by the dis­aster. The palace's rebuilding was an expen­s­ive series of experiments. The 1755 quake dest­r­oyed most of Lisbon, incl­ud­ing the royal palace. So alth­ough the royal fam­ily survived, King José I decided that the new palace should be built on a hill in the Ajuda district of Lisbon.

Main entrance of Ajuda Palace

 

Visitors can visit this Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, the second home of the Port­ug­uese royal family. It was built as the Paço de Madeira/wood. But in 1794 a fire destroyed this second palace and the vast majority of its treasures. Whereas the original stone mat­er­ial of the palace was deadly in an earthquake, the wood of the new palace made it suscep­t­ible to fire. Construction of a stone palace began in 1796.

When Napoleon’s army invaded Portugal in 1807, the royal family fled to Brazil, reigning from that Portuguese colony for some years. They left Palácio Nacional da Ajuda to the best art­is­ts and sculptors then, to work on it in their absence. But when the royals returned to Lisb­on in 1821, the work was in­com­plete and many prefer­red that the country become a republic.

Thus the royal palace was no longer royal, and the neo-classical building was turned into a museum; it also occas­ion­ally hosted off­ic­ial cer­emon­ies, but generally open to the public. It has quite a sumptuous interior, with elaborate décor in several magnificent rooms. The high­lights are the a] Audience Room; b] Throne Room with its ceiling painted in 1825 representing a heavenly temple; c] Banquet Room for official di­n­n­ers; and d] King João IV Room covered with 1823 paint­ings, including a ceiling. The rooms incl­ude a great collect­ion of clocks and an intact dinner service.

Amidst political turmoil in 1833, building stopped! It was only in 1861 that construction works began again, vigorous­ly. The in­terior was renovated as the royal home in 1862, the year Port­ug­uese King Luís I married Princess Maria Pia of Savoy. Soon the palace was where the royals lived AND it was also where diplomatic banquets were held.

Visitors see a music room, stunning dining room, office, games room and an indoor garden room which once housed ex­otic birds and plants. Maria Pia was a very gifted artist and her works are displayed at the Palace. But at King Luís I’s death in 1889 the royal family became div­ided. The con­tinuing building of the palace was no longer a pr­iority. With the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy and the declaration of the Portug­u­ese Republic in 1910, the pal­ace was shut down and for dec­ades was cl­osed to the public.

In 1996 some of the rooms were restored to their original glory: fine chandeliers, painted ceilings, carved furniture, his­toric portraits, ornate doors, price­less sculptures and luxur­ious tap­e­stries.

Today’s Palace is only a third of the size of the original plans; the entrance used today was actually designed as a side entrance. The in­tended main entrance was supposed to face the river so that passengers arriving to Lisbon by ship would see an enorm­ous palace with a grand entrance atop of Ajuda hill. Such a project would have completely ch­anged Lis­bon’s city­scape. It was meant to be one of the larg­est palaces in Europe, with gardens cascading down to the river.

The Music Room is on the ground floor, the private flats on the second while State Rooms occupy the upper floor. There are 1000+ treasur­es, spread over 11 small sections, on 3 levels. The high­lights are the wor­ld's second biggest gold nugg­et, a magnificent dinner set by famed sil­versmith François-Thomas Germain, a 1790s diamond-covered badge, and golden roses from Pope Gregory XVI (1842). As a museum, it gathers imp­or­t­ant collections of C18th-19th decorative arts: gold-silver works, textiles, furniture, ceramics, paintings, sculptures and photographs.

Im­portant State ceremonies held by the Rep­ub­lic’s President still occur. There are two museums, 1]Royal Treasure and 2] the Pal­ace itself. Both have unique pieces of Portuguese hist­ory, great paint­ings, furniture, tapestries, jew­el­lery, porcelains. There is inform­at­ion around the palace, telling the Portuguese royal fam­­il­y’s his­tory. The old ruined west­ern wing was completed in 2021 in modern st­yle to house the Royal Treasure Museum. After €31 mill­, it op­ened to the public June 2022, displaying precious crown jewels.

Audience Hall

Banquet Room

Throne Room

Ajuda Botanical Garden, designed by an Italian botanist, was laid out in 1768. It was Portugal’s first botanical garden, and while it has since lost many of its 5000 species of plants in the 1808 French invasion, the 1993 restorat­ion recr­ea­ted the original gar­d­en. It’s a shame that this fine building and art collection still need more Government investment.

Today the garden is a wonderful place to relax after exiting the Pa­l­ace. From all levels there’s a view of the river and 25 de Abril Bridge, including ancient shady trees and roaming pea­cocks. Some of the trees surround a beautiful C18th fountain adorned with myt­hol­og­ical figures, serpents and seahorses. Visit the garden indep­end­ent­ly from the palace.

Botanical Gardens

Read the very attractive blog: A Portuguese Affair.

Medieval saints, pilgrims, souvenirs

In the Christian tradition, journeying was associated with conversion: all pil­g­rim roads potentially led to Damas­cus. All Christians were stained with sin in his life, but individuals’ motives for going on pilgrimage differed from person to person: to seek health care; ful­fil pil­grim­age vows made during crises; do penance for sins; give thanks for blessings received; as a court punishment for a crime; or for pleasure.

Apostle arm reliquary, German, c1190, silver gilt & enamel, 51cm, 

Cleveland Museum Art

The risks were great: infections, rugged climates, pirates and rape. Mus­lim pirates lurk­ed on the sea routes; other nat­ions’ war­s flared up; ocean storms and epid­emics threat­ened; pil­g­rims had to ob­tain food/shelter en route; and leaving one’s affairs at home was risky. Brigands meant pilgrims tr­a­velled in convoy; pro­tect­ion was needed along the roads and safe places for shel­t­er. Where mon­as­t­eries could not accom­m­odate the crowds, large guest halls were set up by the holy orders. Or hostels at the end of every day’s journey. There they would rec­eive beds of straw, food and alms, a chapel, minstrels and story tellers.

So every temptation that could fascinate the med­ieval mind was linked to pilgrim­age. A general in­dulgence was made by Pope Urban II in 1095 to pilgrims to Jerus­alem, and later to all pilgrims. The ceremony for bless­ing departing pil­grims was held in the local parish church; in his hab­it he lay pr­ostrate before the altar. Each pil­grim re­c­eived a staff and leather satch­el, and wore a grey tun­ic, scarf and large broad-rimmed hat. A red cross was sewn on his garment.

The natural world was seen by medievals as a chaos in which the perp­et­ual int­er­vent­ion of God was the only guiding law; the only rem­edies were prayer and the performance of pious acts. The sexually unchaste were shown as deformed, dis­torted human be­ings. Detailed de­sc­rip­tions of Hell, in­vol­ving fire, brimstone and venomous worms, were on the west fronts of Bour­g­es, Con­ques, Lourdes and Rocamadour. Ex­cep­t for the upper mobil­ity, clergy and wealthy merch­ants, the vast maj­ority could not read. So the church chose sculptural themes that were most likely to capture citizens’ att­ent­ion, elicit their em­otions and improve their morals.

The greatest relics were those associated with Christ, especially once the holy cross was ex­cav­ated in Jerusalem. Relics of the Passion were sent westwards, the crown of thorns going to St Louis of France in Ste Chapelle 1239.

In French pil­gr­images to the Virgin were the pr­inc­i­p­al means by which de­v­otion of uneduc­ated people was ex­press­ed. Virgin statues were placed on al­t­ars, carv­ed images, on shrines, column cap­itals and walls. Relics included: her empty tomb out­side Jer­us­alem; her cloak in the church of Const­an­t­in­­op­le; and her silk tunic in Chartres’ crypt.

If chur­ch­­es could not have relics from Christ or the Virgin, oth­er holy people were next best eg the head of St John the Baptist was preserv­ed at St Hilaire in Poitiers. This cult of saints led to an unpreced­ented demand for relics, given that relics were nec­essary for the consecration of chu­rch­es. There was a great demand for saints’ literature. Saints’ lives were read in the les­s­ons on their feast days; stories were repeated in sermons; and the themes were often ill­ustrated in wall art or stained glass. Teaching the lives and mir­acles of the saints greatly simplified doctrinal issues and encouraged un­educated people with the faith.

The relics were not venerated in them­selves; they were a link to holy martyrs whose lives were a model to humanity. So the more beautiful, the better. Soon precious re­l­iquar­ies were be­ing created to honour those divine persons to whom the relics had once belonged. Where possible, reliquaries were shaped as the cont­ents had app­eared in life.

Reliquary bust, Auvergne, c1160, copper-gilt, ivory & horn, 73cm, 

Mairie de Saint-Nectaire

Medieval people were vul­nera­ble to illness. Phys­ical dis­ease had to have spir­itual causes, brought on by sin; in­fect­ion was the phys­ical tran­s­fer of devils; and barren­ness was a sign of God’s displeasure. The clergy upheld the invocat­ion of the saints as the ONLY sure remedy for sick­ness. Epidemics led to mass pil­grimage to each of the Blessed Virgin’s sanctu­aries. When sick pil­grims came for the Virgin’s inter­vention, they were nur­sed in the crypt hos­pit­al. They slept IN the cath­edral: the nave was sloped for easy sluic­­ing. On saints' feast days, crowds of the sick fil­led the great basilicas. ­[The medical prof­ession did not inspire as much con­fid­ence as the inter­cession of St Thomas or St James]. Many of the great healing shrines cul­tiv­ated their own med­ical special­ities, and the cures were advertised in the saints’ books.

By the late C12th, four shrines vied with Rome & Jerus­alem in import­ance: Compos­tela, Cant­er­bury (imm­ed­ia­t­ely following the 1170 martyrdom of St Thomas Beck­et), Col­ogne and Chartres. Com­post­ela’s popularity reached its peak in the mid C12th, with c500,000 pil­g­rims a year. The best prot­ec­t­­ion for pilgrims in those decades was provided by military monkish orders.

Pilgrimage provided a wealth of memorable experiences: new friends, tourism in new lands, soar­ing gothic spires, physical pains, dazzling shrines and reliquaries, and ultimate relief at the end. Without photos, medieval pilgrim souvenir badges were the best and most evocat­ive memories available to returning pilgrims.

The badges were made to boost revenues at pilgrim sites and to limit damage to shrines that were nicked. Cheap lead alloys allowed thin casting and detailed low-relief imagery, allowing for the production of delicate, silver-bright objects, affordable for the majority of medieval pilgrims.

 St Thomas Becket badge, Canterbury

St Michael's Pilgrim brass badge

England 15th century

Between the C12th and the C16ths they were sold in their thous­ands at famous sites, as well more local sites. Smart badge makers would try and re­f­lect the relics relevant to each pilgrimage sites.

The souvenirs were bought for different reasons. 1] For religiously focused pilgrims, badges could serve an important devotional purp­ose. 2] Medieval artefacts were sparkling, colourful objects, att­ractive to wear. 3] They advertised the particular shrine that had been most important to that group of pilgrims. 4] They could protect the health of the pilgrims on the long trip home. And 5] for the rest of their lives, the souvenirs would remind the pilgrim of the best time in his entire life. Family and friends would be in awe of the one person in the village who had fulfilled his dream.

Most major pilgrim­age sites had at least one easily recognisable image that could be reprod­uced on a badge. Santiago de Compostela badges were shell-shaped; Amiens’ was John the Bap­tist's head on a plate; St Albans’ showed the saint's martyr­dom. The badge of Thomas Becket at Canterbury was his jewel-encrusted reliquary that housed a holy skull fragment.

The delicious history of ice cream

I REALLY wanted to buy a beautifully hand painted pair of Coalport porcelain ice pails, c1802. An orange ph­eas­ant with golden wings perched on branches blooming with red and gold flowers. Then see panels of deep cob­alt blue containing swirl­ing gold leaves and flower med­allions. On the top of each lid was a pagoda style cottage next to streams and trees. Imari col­ours of iron red, blue and green, with rich gold covering the scrolled han­dles and the twisted branches, were exotic. These porcelain coolers were trad­it­ionally placed on the din­ing-room side­board, the bottom was filled with ice, then cream & fruit were added. [Most pairs of Georgian ice pails sold for $2,500-10,000, sadly for me].

Coalport porcelain ice pails, c1802,
1stDibs New York

And royal porcel­ain fact­ories like Sèvres near Paris produced ice-cream cups and saucers for shops and homes, as wealthy families joined the ice-cream excitement.

This led to me reading histories of ice-cream, the best being Al­fon­so Lopez who explained that cold treats went back to the ancient wor­ld. Chinese people, for example, en­joy­ed a frozen syr­up. By 400 BC, sharbat was a popular Persian treat, featuring syr­ups made from cher­r­ies, quinces and pom­­e­g­ranates cooled with snow. Thus the mod­ern words sh­er­bet, sorbet and syrup. Alexander the Great enjoyed ices sweet­ened with honey in 330 BC. Roman Emp­eror Nero enjoyed cold fruit juices mixed with honey at his ban­quets.

If icy products first ev­ol­ved in Asia, they may have been introd­uc­ed to Europe by Marco Polo after he arrived home from China in 1295 AD with rec­ip­es for flav­oured ices. Chinese dealers procured ice from cold, mount­ain­ous areas, hand­lers packed it with straw to reduce melting and carried it to urban areas. Finally it was stored in icehouses.

The best known British recipe for ice-cream was pub­lish­ed in LadyAnn Fanshawe in the mid 1660s. Presumably Lady Ann, whose husband Richard was Charles II's ambassador to King Phillip IV’s Spanish court, learnt about iced refreshments at the Madrid court. Her ingredients, mace and orange-flower water, became popular. Fruits and herbs, tea or coffee, honey and crumb­led bis­cuits were also  added.The term ice-cream in English first appeared in May 1671, among other elaborate dishes served at Windsor’s Feast of St George.

Ice cream was exclusively for the upper classes when it arrived in Britain

Dream Scoops

The C17th saw ice drinks being made into frozen desserts. With added sugar, sorbet was created. Antonio Latini (1642-92) was working for a Spanish Viceroy in Naples, and cred­ited with being the first per­son to print a sorbetto recipe. And he was responsible for creating a milk-based sorbet, which most culinary historians call the first official ice-cream. In Nap­l­es, cli­m­ate and culture came together and in 1690 a book on sorb­etti app­eared: New and Quick Ways to Make All Kinds of Sorbets With Ease.

Latini's book, 1694
New and Quick Ways to Make All Kinds of Sorbets with Ease

By the C17th private European estates had ice­houses, then large public icehouses were built in cities. In some cities the ice trade was regulated by the authorities, who set prices & penal­t­ies for illegal sales. Then Sicilian Francesco Procopio dei Colt­elli opened a Paris café in 1686, Il Procope. The site became a meet­ing place for noted intellectuals eg Benjamin Frank­lin, Victor Hugo, Napoleon. A perfect com­binat­ion: intell­ec­t­ual soc­ial life and ice-cream! The café introduced gel­ato, the Ital­ian ver­sion of sorbet, to the French public. It was ser­ved in small porc­el­ain bowls resembling egg cups. Thus Procopio became known as the Father of Italian Gelato.

Europe’s growing middle classes discover­ed the pleas­ures of frozen sweets in local shops. Along with sorbetti i.e ices churned during freezing, there were granitas (fruit and ice), and sorbetti con crema (milk added).

An ice-cream recipe book was published in France in 1768: True prin­c­ip­les for freezing refreshments.

Lady of the house, examining the trays of icecream prepared by the household staff.
Valencia 1775

Sorbetiera were Naples street vendors who sold sorbetto. Trav­ellers to Nap­les often remarked on sorb­etto in their scenes of the city’s street life. In 1839 the Count­ess of Bl­essington wrote: The gaiety of the streets of Naples at night was unparall­eled. The ice-shops and cafes were crowded by the beau monde, the portable barr­ows in the streets were surrounded by more ordinary people. Naples alone had  43 legal ice sellers.

Naples street vendor selling sorbetto,

18th century

Al­though the craze soon sp­read to the North American col­onies, it was still an expen­sive lux­ury in the C18th. A New York merchant sh­owed that Pres. George Wash­ington sp­ent c$200 for ice-cream in sum­mer 1790! But the USA was where ice-cream finally became afford­able to the mass­es. In 1843 New Yorker Nancy Johnson in­vented the first hand cranked ice-cream maker that drastically re­duced production time, receiving the first US patent for a small-scale ice-cream freezer. American firms improved on her design and built new mach­ines that lowered production costs. In 1851 Jac­ob Fussell of Baltim­ore Md built the first ice-cream factories!

By mid-C19th, ice-cream saloons were plentiful along New York’s avenues, experimenting with different productions. Parkinson’s on Broadway created pistachio ice-cream. Pat­ent Steam Icecream Saloon, named for its steam-operated freez­ing unit, catered to mid­d­le class women, wives of substantial trades­men, mechanics and art­is­ans. And Salem!

Af­ter America’s Civil War (1861–5), ice-cream’s popularity exp­loded across U.S, with special­ist shops appearing for the middle classes. Their ice-creams, sorbets and sher­berts were still a bit exot­ic: Mrs DA Lincoln produced several edit­ions of pam­phlets, including Frosty Fancies 1898 and Frozen Dainties 1899, pub­lished for the freezer man­ufacturer White Mountain. She used ice-creams made with arrow­root, cornstarch and gelatin, not eggs.

Although American street vendors started selling ice-cream only a few decades after France and the UK, America’s industrial rev­ol­ution had to focus on the re­frigerat­ion issue. So note that in the US, continuous refriger­at­ion became a reality with electrical freezers in 1926.

London ice cream cart

1877

Photo credits: Dream Scoops.

stunning Canfranc Railway Station on the Spanish-French border, now a hotel

Royal opening of Canfranc Railway Station

1928

In 1853, the Spanish and French govern­ments agreed to boost their trade links via a new rail line. Spain already had two main border crossings with France, and the demand for a 3rd border crossing was growing later that century. Thus Canfranc Inter­nat­ional Railway Station was planned, high in the Spanish Pyr­enees Mountains.

Construction of the station started in 1923 and ended five years later. Even though Canfranc was a village of only 500 people, it was a perfect place for both countries. Formally opened in 1928 by King Alfonso XIII of Spain and President of the French Republic, Gaston Dou­mergue, the opulent station used to be one of Eur­ope’s largest rail hubs, designed in the Golden Age of train travel.

Alfonso Marco is historian & engineer for the Technological Dept of the Spanish Railway. In his book The Canfranc History of a Leg­endary Train (2018), Marco costed the expensive project. And Miguel Rubio, Madrid Museum of Railways’ historian, showed the in­vest­ment was justified by practical and stylistic reasons. The grow­ing popularity of the railways required something special. The eclectic Beaux-Arts style ch­osen for the ex­terior was inspired by French palatial arch­itecture, while the interior was designed more like Classical Roman arch­itecture.

The st­ruc­t­ure was huge: 365 windows, one for each day of the year; hund­reds of doors; and 200+ ms long plat­forms. Clearly the Spanish government had hoped to attract rich visitors from ac­ross the continent to the station’s hotel. Works to build this colossal hub, which became the second biggest station in Europe, allowed each country to have its own booths of beau­tiful carved wood.

Once this mag­nificent building was created, why did it fall into disrepair? The first important issue was the different rail gauges used in the 2 coun­tries, meeting on either side of the border. This became a logist­ical problem as pass­engers and goods had to be transferred from one train to another. Canfranc was mainly in Spain but part of the stat­ion was considered French terr­itory; in fact a school was established in the village for the chil­dren of French staff. Now it is a station solely on the Spanish side.

It was the second biggest train station in Europe! Yet there were many crises for Canfranc. Despite the fanfare around its construction and inauguration, the 1929 Depress­ion hit and soon the massive station was only carrying 50 passengers a day. And only 3 years after opening, the second crisis hit: a blaze broke out in the lobby and surroundings, causing expensive damages.

Spanish dictator Francisco Fran­co shut the surrounding tunnels during the Spanish Civil War, to stop arms smuggling. And even more importantly, during WW2, it was one of the paths that Franco used to supply raw materials and food to Nazi Germany. A Spanish newspaper said the station became a “Casab­l­anca in the Pyrenees”, a key crossing for goods, and the esp­ionage centre for Nazi and Spanish authorities.

  

Hitler and Franco at Canfranc

Photo credit: Hobo Laments

In 1942 the Nazis took control of the area, the only part of Spain where they succeeded. The Iberian mountains yielded minerals that Nazi Germany needed for its military build-up before and during WW2. Spain provided the conduit for tungsten/wolfram, a metal used to strengthen Nazi Panzer tank armour used to such devastating effect in expanding Germany’s Lebensraum. Through Canfranc Station the rare earth of Portuguese origin passed on its way to Germany’s flourishing Wehrmacht. In return for the grey lustrous metal, Nazi payments came in the form of gold bars, circumventing the economic embargo imposed by the Allies.  

The Gestapo pulled people off the trains and hid the Jew­ish gold the Germans plundered. Yet at the same time the station became an escape route for many Jews, Resistance members and Allied soldiers, a centre for anti-Fascist spies and the forging and distribution of travel docu­ments. But how did the pro-Nazis and the anti-Nazis find Canfranc so funct­ional during the same war? The critical role Canfranc played during WW2 is still deb­ated in the re­cords. Yet having remained non-functional for trains for years, it’s clear that Canfranc’s status as a historical monument, before and during WW2, remained.

Main entrance

Exterior of Canfranc Railway Station today

In front of the Spanish Pyr­enees Mountains

Post WW2, the stunning facade fell apart; interiors were ruined; and the village population faded away. Still, tourists began to wander around the dil­ap­idated station, attracted by the historical present­ation from the recent past. But the history of the Canfranc line was sometimes an unsuccessful one, given its poor results and chronic under­funding. The Pyr­enees station, once been an emblem of trade, opulence and glob­alisation…. until a freight train derailment hit a bridge and dem­olished it, closing its already ail­ing line in Mar 1970. The bridge could have been easily replaced, but France no longer cared about the line. They decided that the bridge was too expensive to rebuild.

One of the long, open and airy corridors inside the station

Now the new hotel's lobby

Below the earth, Spanish physic­ists opened the Canfranc Underground Astroparticle Laboratory in 1985. Note the entrance beneath the station and movable labs set up on the old railway tunnels.

Spanish trains are run­ning again, but on a very modest scale. Now plans have been made to reopen the line into France. The Aragon Government is working to con­vert the station’s wide spaces into a 5-star hotel with 104 rooms. Work to rehabil­it­ate the area, declared a Site of Cultural Interest in 2007, is already focusing on the external facade.

Now that French officials also wish to restore Canfranc, the station will regain its original splendour. Restoration works are cur­rently foc­used on: 1] reopening the inter­national line, which will have consequences for Spain and France, and 2] rehabil­it­ation of the st­ation for its en­ormous historical and monumental value. Import­antly the Eur­opean Comm­ission already app­roved subsidies to help Spain.

The new project involv­ing the Governments of Aragon, France and the European Comm­is­sion has brought the station back to its former glory. The palatial building reopened in Jan 2023 as the classy Canfranc Estacion, a 104-room hotel showing the luxury associated with the golden age of travel. In the lobby, once the lofty customs hall, with the coat of arms of France high on one wall and that of Spain on the wall above reception.

French-Spanish border

with Toulouse to the north and Canfranc to the south

Read Canfranc: bringing an abandoned railway station back to life, Adele Berti.