News

La Marfà

One hundred and eighty-one years of yarn manufacturing in Santa Eugènia de Ter.

Girona City History Museum organised a guided walk during which Jaume Prat described the importance of the River Ter and La Marfà factory for the history of the former village of Santa Eugènia de Ter.
The walk was an exercise in industrial archaeology, during which we learned all about the history of the first textile factory in the Girona area. La Marfà was built in 1819 over the Monar Canal in order to harness its flow. Over the 181 years of its existence in the same building, La Marfà manufactured goods ranging from cotton and cotton-mix yarns to coloured synthetic fibres, until the factory moved to the nearby locality of Salt in the year 2000. The factory was a point of reference for the inhabitants of Santa Eugènia de Ter, all of whom had relatives or acquaintances working there and for whom the factory bell (later siren) signalling the shifts was the backdrop of their daily lives. The company also played a major role in the industrialisation of Girona.
The thirty-odd persons who defied the freezing weather to take part in the guided walk had the opportunity of seeing the première of a documentary on factory workers and foremen of La Marfà, thus gaining first-hand understanding of the factory operation and the workers'conditions.
Fifty years ago, on 8 December 2012, the villages of Sant Daniel, Santa Eugènia de Ter and Palau-sacosta were officially annexed to Girona. Santa Eugènia de Ter ceased to be an independent locality in 1963.