As mayor of Barcelona (1957–1973), Porcioles embodied Franco’s prototypic Catalan collaborator. He played a key role in an operation conceived to clean up the image of the regime; he was criticised for the construction of the sprawling urban Barcelona, but he was also praised for achievements such as the Picasso Museum and the return of the Compilation of the Catalan Civil Code.

© Pérez de Rozas / AFB
Porcioles accompanies Franco in his car on a visit by the dictator to the city of Barcelona on 30 April 1960.

With the passage of time, Josep Maria de Porcioles i Colomer (Amer 1904 – Vilassar de Dalt 1993) has become one of the most paradoxical and difficult-to-interpret figures of the Catalan political scenario, particularly due to the enormous contradiction of his role.

He was on the one hand actively involved in Franco’s dictatorship, being responsible for controversial actions such as the construction of outlying neighbourhoods crammed with immigrants from southern Spain, often veritable suburban corners, such as Ciutat Diagonal, la Pau, el Turó de la Peira, Sant Roc de Badalona, la Mina de Sant Adrià, Bellvitge de l’Hospitalet and many others; and also, among other things, for the partial destruction of Barcelona’s modernist architecture, promoting populist-style tenements, with the famous small attic flats built on top of existing ones, particularly in the Eixample neighbourhood.

Meanwhile, though, Porcioles also felt personally obliged to carry out many other works that, in view of what Franco’s regime signified in Catalonia, must be seen in a positive light. For the first time since Franco’s victory in 1939, Porcioles lent his support to displays of Catalan folklore and popular culture, such as sardana dancing (forbidden by Franco) and the “festa dels tres tombs” (a celebration in which people bring their animals to receive a blessing). He also did a lot to promote the creation of the Picasso Museum and the Miró Foundation. Whichever way you look at it, it was a surprising course of action, stemming from the compensatory side of the jurist’s personality, a man of his time: a sui generis ambiguity, also very “Porciolian”, straddling the positive and the negative, which culminated in 1960 with the historic approval by the Spanish Parliament, following negotiations involving the mayor, of the so-called special Compilation of Civil Law, a landmark largely unknown to most people but one of capital symbolic and juridical importance for the country.

This Compilation adhered to and recovered the former solidity of the historic Civil Code of Catalonia, a collective work that enjoyed the consensus of the Parliament of Catalonia, according full legitimacy to an independent Catalan Law. To put it another way, the recovery of the Compilation, virtually unique and ground-breaking in Europe, restored legitimacy to the series of modern civil regulations that had been suppressed with the Bourbonic invasion of 1714. In a nutshell, at its most basic level, it symbolised the return of people’s civil freedoms.

The Compilation was the culmination of a protracted historical process, the fruit of the cultural Renaissance and political Catalan nationalism, and however contradictory it may seem, it was born of the highly moderate Catalan nationalism of a man who was close to the dictatorship, as if his origins and sense of morality outweighed his political leanings.

Porcioles also addressed the ambitious Barcelona 2000 plan and a universal expo for the city in 1982, which never came to fruition, but which brought up the idea of the Olympic Games. In short, as the housing estates spread chaotically and vertically, it was as if the mayor who had sponsored, built and spawned the speculation and private business in that Barcelona of the sixties, ravaged by the post-war period, had fallen prey to a bout of schizophrenia, which would also affect numerous key characters in the regime, such as Joan Antoni Samaranch. Franco’s former national delegate of Physical Education and Sports became obsessed with bringing the Olympic Games to Barcelona in 1992 in an ambitious personal campaign designed to clean up his image with his countrymen and also for the sake of posterity, in all probability because he had raised his hand firmly during the dictatorship. Porcioles is a similar case.

When the dictator hand-picked him as mayor of Barcelona in 1957 he knew what he was doing. The loyal Director General of Records and Notarial Affairs of the Ministry of Justice, also an experienced notary public in Barcelona and member of Parliament, was the ideal man for the job. Porcioles would be mayor for four consecutive mandates; sixteen years on the trot. But the choice of Porcioles was prompted by the urgent change of tack that Franco was obliged to undertake at the end of the fifties, a significant example of which is the return of the Catalan Compilation.

According to the notary public of Barcelona, Lluís Jou, this volte face by the dictator, “apart from the mayor of Barcelona’s power of persuasion, is part of the economic change strategy undertaken two years previously, and which – according to Jou – became known as Operation Catalonia, an attempt by Franco’s regime to garner greater sympathy in our country, to allay the suspicion generated by the new economic policy and gain credibility abroad for its policy of opening up the country, which could only be successful if it was done through Catalonia”. Jou also asserts that “it is a strategy that Porcioles also promoted in the belief that closer collaboration would squeeze greater concessions” out of the dictator. This may be so, but paradoxically the recovered Compilation spurred the regime on, and Porcioles thus played a key role in Franco’s regime opening up towards new political and economic models; it enabled his great Barcelona, with all its characteristic and disconnected ambiguities, to become indispensable for the Spanish state to be able to join the international economic institutions.

© La Vanguardia news archive
Cover of the La Vanguardia newspaper from 21 July 1960 announcing the approval by Franco’s parliament of the special civil law codification, and an image of the mayor addressing the court agents.

Porcioles, as a Catalan integrated in Franco’s regime, embodied the ultimate great paradox. During his spell as president of the county council of Lleida (1940–43), for example, he recovered the cathedral, which had been turned into an army barracks by Philip V, and set up the Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs there, a pivotal cultural centre in the area of Lleida. As mayor of Barcelona, he is accorded the merit of promoting a special law for the city, the Barcelona Charter, which gave him presidential-like powers, dispensing with the regime’s structure; the idea and implementation of the system for using water from the river Ter for the water supply were also his; he also secured the return of the mountain and castle of Montjuïc to the city and fostered all kinds of trade fairs and congresses as well as the initial investments in the underground in the wake of the Civil War.

Porcioles was a church-goer, a man of profound beliefs, wise; he had an aristocratic, stately bearing, and the fact that he had difficulty uttering certain words (he had a stammer) made him more endearing, restrained, distant. But what mattered most was that he was a notary public. A man who could be trusted, who had followed in his father’s and grandfather’s professional footsteps. He passed the official examination to become a notary public in 1932. He had also been local leader of the Catalanist party Lliga. When the Civil War broke out he eventually fled to France after spending a few months in the Model prison. On his return, he embraced the natural destiny of many liberal right-wingers: he adapted to Franco’s regime and even adopted its most censurable and negative traits. With the slogan of “the best path is from revolution to concord”, as mayor of Barcelona he was harshly criticised for promoting excessive inner-city traffic through projects such as the Ronda del Mig, Avinguda Meridiana, the Vallvidrera tunnels and the network of paying car parks.

In the case of the Vallvidrera tunnels, he was blamed for leaving the project unfinished because the tunnels cause traffic jams going into Barcelona along Via Augusta. This infrastructure was supposed to link up with another major road that would cross the city as far as Carrer Numància and even reach Montjuïc, which would have greatly improved rush-hour traffic, but which evidently never came to fruition. Others have accused him of doing away with the trams and of over-municipalising public transport with the introduction of the city bus, because this measure failed to alleviate car pressure in the city. But beyond all this criticism, some of it really harsh, the fact that Porcioles made Barcelona a modern city in line with the world’s great cities and, with all the related pros and cons, also one of the world’s most visited and admired is beyond any dispute.

FC Barcelona, or Barça, as it is known, and the way it is today, would be impossible to understand without the semi-anonymous figure of Oriol Tort Martínez (Barcelona 1929–1999), the talent spotter who discovered Guardiola, Iniesta and Xavi, and a key figure in modern football, who devoted a lifetime to the club to create an effective and productive youth academy with a way of playing and understanding attacking football that defines the club today.

© Arxiu FC Barcelona
Tort at a presentation of the lower-category teams at the Barça Mini-stadium.

To begin with, Oriol Tort would have regarded having an article dedicated to him as extraneous, to say nothing of someone having the brilliant idea of such an iconic building as La Masia (the farmhouse, Barça’s youth training facility), where dozens of players have been trained and brought up and which he himself helped to establish, being named after him. The legendary scout, who discovered veritable rough diamonds such as Cesc, Iván de la Peña, Amor, Valdés, Gabri, Iniesta, Xavi, Celades and so on, not to mention virtually the whole of the current Barça squad, subs bench included (Vilanova and Roure are also from La Masia Oriol Tort), would have said in his casual, comical way that it was no big deal. Tort was a remarkably humble man who lived solely and exclusively to keep FC Barcelona true to its way of understanding the game, imported from Holland and Eastern Europe, which peaked with Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team.

Having been through most of the possible phases in FC Barcelona, as player and coach in the under-13s section, Tort finally became coordinator of the youth divisions in 1977. But it was under the leadership of Josep Lluís Núñez (1978–2000) that he was entrusted with the most special and secretive task – spotting new talents, forming a farm team of future stars framed within the symbol of La Masia, the eighteenth-century farmhouse that stands next to the Camp Nou. Oriol Tort became a talent spotter when this profession was still in its infancy.

In actual fact, Tort combined scouting with his day job as a pharmaceutical representative. After work he would take off to watch matches, particularly under-13s. He spent his weekends doing nothing else. Sometimes, in mid-season, he attended between fifteen to twenty football matches. In almost three decades of non-stop activity, the eyes of Oriol Tort took in hundreds and thousands of children, who were unaware that the Barça scout was in the stand to observe, analyse and detect future stars. It was his speciality, as it would soon be plain to see.

One day, just like any other, his eyes latched onto a small, somewhat puny child, who was playing in Gimnàstic Manresa, and who had an uncanny skill with the ball. He was just was he was looking for, and Tort knew it. The boy fitted in perfectly with the ethos of attacking football the club wanted to build from the ground up, the typically Dutch style that Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff introduced and which would be the basis of the future Dream Team of the nineties – intelligence, skill, speed. That skinny boy would be the prototype of this style. Tort had just discov­ered Pep Guardiola.

The legendary scout promptly brought another one of his great skills into play, one that was perhaps even more valuable. He talked to the parents. He convinced them to send their children to La Masia, where they would be brought up in the lower ranks of the club to play in the juveniles, and where their schooling would not be neglected. Moreover, Tort told them that in La Masia the boys were brought up within a system of values based on respect and friendship. If all went well, they might even make the first team.

© Arxiu FC Barcelona
Oriol Tort during a meal at La Masia.

Tort was a man who left nothing to chance. He used to have lunch with the boys in La Masia’s dining room. He joked with them. He was cheerful and friendly, and often did impersonations. He made them laugh, and played with them. He took care of the ones who were homesick. He took the ones who came from further away, such as Arnau or Arteta, home with him at weekends where they were treated like part of the Tort family. Never has a football club got so much out of a committed and sensitive employee like Oriol Tort for so long.

Barça’s scouting work became more systematic and professional in 1980, when it took on board another even more crucial and unknown figure, Joan Martínez Vilaseca (Manresa, 1943), who is still working as a FIFA talent scout. Juan Martínez, signed by the club straight from RCD Espanyol, formed a perfect duo with Oriol Tort, working together for twenty-eight years non-stop. Tort and Martínez became known as the Dream Team of the “despatxet” [little office], as Martínez himself called the office shared by both of them in the old premises of FC Barcelona over the club’s Palau de Gel, and from where they built up a veritable factory of home-grown players.

Tort focused all his scouting work on under-14s. Martínez focused on the under-19s. It was he who discovered Carles Puyol, for example, who entered the club at the eleventh hour, or more exactly at the age seventeen, on Martínez’s personal recommendation. Martínez was a modern version of Tort. In actual fact, it was he who was responsible for discovering Cesc and Bojan Krkic. But that did not make any difference. Tort and Martínez were modest, frugal and discreet, while work in the “little office” was frantic, passionate and constant. There were no computers. Just one land-line. Martínez recalls the frugality, coordination and sheer joy of their work. They would play about with a plastic mobile phone, pretending they were phoning big-time stars.

Tort worked with little pieces of paper stuffed into his pockets – he had no agenda. They kept their information on promising young players in folders. The idea was to see as many games as possible, and weekends did not exist as they went from one ground to another. It was a laborious task, self-sacrificing and anonymous, with no messing about. They were not after accolades. They were a two-man team who watched an incredible number of kids together, stringing trips together so as not to miss a match. They gave up their time with the family to watch kids playing football. They did whatever it took.

© Arxiu FC Barcelona
Oriol Tort with a youth team player, in 1980.

In the nineties, the “little office” of Tort and Martínez began to yield its fruit. And there was something that was even more important. The great secret, the Dutch idea from Michels and Cruyff – have up-and-coming young players trained in La Masia debut with the first team. “Seeing a kid like Iniesta make his debut in Camp Nou was our reward,” says Martínez Vilaseca. Nobody could ever have imagined the patience, the effort, the hours of work that were put it. It is the story of Xavi, Guardiola, Iniesta and Puyol, debuting thanks to Dutch trainers of the ilk of Cruyff, Van Gaal and Rijkaard, the goal being to culminate the work of the club’s farm team.

With the advent of modern times, Tort’s system based on scraps of paper became somewhat obsolete. Computers and printers populated the office. Everyone wanted reports, files, exhaustive studies. Tort, who had never written a report, realised that the end was nigh for him. Football clubs had to move with the times. In the final years, Martínez helped him as best he could. But Tort’s era was over, and this all coincided with a diagnosis of bone cancer. Tort was a heavy smoker, and he passed away in 1999. At the funeral, Guardiola said of his discoverer, “Today, Barça is less wise.” Josep Mussons, one of the club’s historic directors, who hails from the city of Igualada, said that “if we made a list of all the footballers discovered by Tort, that list would encircle the stadium”. The most telling and definitive statement came from Del Bosque: “Oriol Tort represents that anonymous person who nevertheless is crucial to all clubs.”