Strawberries and Santa Coloma
Have you ever noticed that our giant Margarita is carrying in the basket she is carrying on her arm? Exactly! They are strawberries! And how is it that she is carrying this fruit? Let’s find out! Margarita owes her name to the flowers that grew in the strawberry fields.
Although it is hard for us to imagine now, at the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, the city was full of fields where, in addition to its famous strawberries, cereals were harvested and vineyards were planted on the slopes of its hills.
As Miguel Viñas Bayá said in an interview given to the first issue of the magazine Grama, Santa Coloma at that time “was an agricultural town. Its main crops were cereals, vines, hemp and the famous strawberries, whose fame was well deserved.”
We know from the grandparents and older people who have explained it to us, that the strawberries of Santa Coloma were not of any variety. Our farmers used to go up to Montseny during Holy Week, towards Sant Hilari de Sacalm and its surroundings, to collect the wild strawberry bushes that grow there and carefully bring them down in their horse-drawn carts to plant them in the village’s fields.
The strawberries from Santa Coloma were famous, not only in the village but also in the surrounding area, which meant that people from the surrounding villages even came in horse-drawn carts to the Cal Coronel inn, attracted by its rice dishes and especially by its fresh strawberries that were served as dessert. The Enciclopèdia Catalana also reminds us that it was customary to meet up to have a Fresada in Cal Coronel.
But it was not just that people from outside came, attracted by the quality of the strawberries served at the Fonda. They were so well-known and produced in such quantity that even our farmers took them to sell at the Boqueria, as stated by Joan Sáez, son of the guard at the Santa Coloma train station, which was located on the banks of the Besós next to the Trinidad, in an interview with the magazine Fórum Grama in January 2012:
“the farmers who harvested the strawberries in those fields, when they finished the day, so as not to carry the baskets in Santa Coloma, left them in the hut and, the next morning, came to collect them to take them to the Boqueria, taking the tram that left from Sant Andreu.”