Salvador Sans on the true coffee visionary, Josep Guardiola i Grau
On my first trips to coffee plantations in Latin America, I was intrigued to find the mechanical dryers called “Guardiolas,” a Catalan surname.
Upon further investigation, this fascinating story emerged, connecting love, coffee, adventure, and Gaudí’s marvelous architecture, along with one of his most iconic buildings: Casa Milá, or Pedrera.
Isabel Goig Soler and her extensive work on the legacy of Josep Guardiola i Grau
As an editor for Fórum Café magazine, one of the stories I’ve most enjoyed writing has been the fascinating story of Josep Guardiola i Grau, the Catalan Indian who emigrated to Guatemala and revolutionized the world of coffee with his innovative vertical coffee dryer.
It was Salvador Sans who first told me about this captivating character and gave me the first clues about the Chocolá estate, owned by Guardiola. From there, we began a fascinating investigation.
History and life of the Catalan Indian who discovered the secret formula for coffee
To reconstruct his life and legacy, we drew on various sources of information. We contacted the town hall of Aleixar, Guardiola’s hometown, to obtain information about his origins. We also conducted in-depth research into specialized works such as “Historia del café de Guatemala” by Regina Wagner and “La Herencia del Hindú” by Josep Maria Clavería, which gave us a broader view of the historical and economic context in which his career developed. We also compared data with the Chocolá Archaeological Project, an initiative investigating the farm where Guardiola developed his innovations in coffee cultivation. By stretching the thread, we unearthed a story deserving of being told, one that combines entrepreneurship, adventure, and a legacy that endures to this day.
Discover Josep Guardiola i Grau and read his entire story on the Cafés El Magnífico blog.
Few stories of Indianos are as intense and have left such a lasting mark as that of Josep Guardiola i Grau. This enterprising figure, born in the Tarragona town of l’Aleixar in 1831, lived in England and the United States, owned a coffee farm in Guatemala, earned income in Brazil, was a founding shareholder in the Panama Canal, and invented the famous automatic coffee drying machine of his name, the “Guardiola.” After his death, his inheritance was used to build the magnificent Casa Milà in Barcelona (“La Pedrera”) and to finance various projects in his hometown, where he was declared a favorite son in 1897.
Son of Don Ramón Guardiola y Veciana and Doña Josepa Grau Gebellí, Josep Guardiola i Valls belonged to one of the most important lineages in the history of Áleixar. His republican and progressive tendencies, very different from the family’s Pug fanaticism, were decisive in Guardiola’s decision, at just sixteen years old, to accept the proposal of former friar Anton Artells i Vallverdú to “go on an adventure.” He first went to England and then, like many young men of his time, to America, to San Francisco, where he made a fortune and was able to buy two houses. After a few years, he settled in Guatemala, where he bought the Chocolá estate in San Pablo Jocopilas, in the Bocacosta region. The estate produced sugarcane and coffee, and it is said that it took at least two days on horseback to trace the perimeter.
Chocolá was not too far from Lake Atitlán, halfway, and above all at mid-altitude, between what in Guatemala they call the cold land—the Mayan plateau—and what they call the Pacific coast—the hot land. They say that from there, thanks to the combination of altitude, rain, and volcanic soil, the highest quality coffee beans in all of Central America came out.
In the final decades of the 19th century, Guatemala was the world’s leading coffee exporter, even ahead of Brazil and Colombia, and Guardiola made a fortune exporting Chocolá coffee beans worldwide. He introduced several innovations to the production process and it was during this time that he invented his machine, La Guardiola, a type of automatic dryer for coffee beans. This machine was a revolutionary invention for the sector, as it allowed the beans to dry quickly and evenly—a result not achieved in patios, as the sun cannot act equally on all the beans—and without cracking them, so that European consumers considered his coffee to be of higher quality than that of his competitors.
To hull the parchment coffee, Guardiola used a system of mortar combinations, in which grinders rose and fell, leaving the coffee in gold ready for export.
In 1880, coffee washing, drying, and threshing machines patented by Josep Guardiola and manufactured in New York were being sold in Guatemala. According to contemporary information, the price of the machines ranged from 1,170 to 3,870 pesos, depending on their drying capacity, from 25 to 100 quintals of coffee per day.
When Guardiola’s patent expired, his system was adopted by almost all of the world’s major coffee mill manufacturers, including McKinnon, who improved Guardiola’s system in 1882. Four years later, Guardiola, who was always looking for new solutions to improve the production and quality of the coffee on his farm, obtained a patent for another coffee drying machine in the United States, although this one never achieved the success of the first one, which is still in use today, with the obvious improvements that technological evolution has brought.
At the end of the 19th century, there were several large blacksmith workshops in Europe and the United States that produced a wide variety of coffee processing machine models, with the Guardiola dryer being the best known and most accepted system.
The success of his machine brought him a significant capital inflow, which was further increased by his business acumen. Being a good businessman, he sold the farm before coffee prices began to fall, selling Chocolá to Germans in 1891 for thousands more than the price he had purchased it for.
His fortune was yet to grow further thanks to his actions, spearheaded by engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had achieved the great challenge of opening an immense canal from the coast of Panama to the coast, which would revolutionize global maritime trade. The project was a resounding failure, halted after ten years of construction and resulting in twenty thousand deaths from workplace accidents and tropical fevers. However, it was an unprecedented success for investors, as the United States eventually bought the company’s concession rights to build the canal.
The income generated from the sale of Chocolá and these shares allowed Guardiola to return to L’Aleixar as one of the wealthiest Indianos in the country. Accompanying him on his return home was Lola, the only recognized child this Indiano had fathered in Guatemala. And it was precisely through this daughter that Josep Guardiola would meet his future wife, Roser Segimon, a young woman forty years his junior, with whom he shared an intense love affair. Rosario was beautiful, with very pale skin, so much so that she looked like porcelain. “Her bones felt like glass, and that’s why she broke them a couple of dozen times throughout her life,” recalled her distant relative, the writer Albert Manent i Segimon.
The couple settled in Barcelona in a house that still exists on the Pasaje de la Concepción with the letters JG on the facade, where they led an opulent life. They traveled frequently to Paris, spent their summers in Blanes (Girona), and rested in L’Aleixar, where he often returned. At that time, they were always surrounded by numerous servants, including two coachmen, a valet, a waitress, a cook, a washerwoman, an ironer, and a hairdresser. They made pleasure trips to Egypt and the United States, and among the peculiarities recorded in some biographies of this illustrious coffee-growing figure are the fact that he sported a generous mustache, wore English clothes, and bathed every day. There are also many possibilities that he was a Freemason.
Guardiola combined his business with his role as executor of Pau Gil, another Catalan living in Paris, whose inheritance was used to build the new hospital dedicated to his patron saint, Saint Paul. The man from L’Aleixar also participated in the purchase of the Comas foundry to build the La Paloma banquet hall, promoted a nursing home in his town, now converted into the “Josep Guardiola” Home, and also the L’Aleixar cemetery, where he had a pantheon built where he is buried alongside his wife.
A cultured man who spoke several languages, in his later years he devoted his energies to devising a lexicon and grammar for a new universal language that would serve merchants, travelers, and sailors. Guardiola claimed that the idea of a universal language came to him in America while traveling among indigenous peoples whose language he didn’t understand. After years of speculation, in 1893 he published in Paris, paying for the edition himself, Gramatika uti nove prata (Grammar of a New Language), a mixture of Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan.
The Guardiola-Segimon marriage lasted ten years. In 1901, while taking off his boots, he died of a heart attack in Paris. His body was transported by train to the pantheon he had built for himself in L’Aleixar, and his wife, Roser Segimon, became the mistress of one of the largest fortunes in Barcelona. Two years after his death, Guardiola’s widow met Pere Milá, a young Barcelona native from a good family, at the Vichy spa. They say, with a certain spunky spirit, that he took notice of her and wouldn’t leave her alone until he got her to agree to his marriage proposal. This served to fuel gossip in Barcelona’s high society circles, where a rumor spread that Milá had been married twice: to Guardiola’s widow and to the widow’s piggy bank. (Guardiola is a Catalan word that, translated into Spanish, means piggy bank.)
The Milà-Segimon couple first settled in an apartment on Rambla dels Estudis, later comparing, in 1905, the tower that Mr. Ferrer-Vidal had on the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Carrça Provença, with over 1,800 square meters of land. The couple agreed to build a three-story building there, but they disagreed on the choice of architect. He insisted on hiring Antonio Gaudí, a family acquaintance who, just a few meters down the road, was putting the finishing touches on Casa Batlló. However, she found the shapes of her fellow countryman from Reus unsuitable for her tastes and position. After several marital arguments, she finally agreed to hire Gaudí, and a good part of the fortune she had inherited from her first husband, 600,000 pesetas at the time, was used to build this house, which was finished in 1910, six years before another good chunk of Guardiola’s money went towards the reconstruction of Barcelona’s Monumental bullring.
Returning to La Pedrera, it is true that officially it was Casa Milà, but the Milàs contributed little more than their surnames, because the purchase of the land, the fees of the architect Antonio Gaudí, the transport of the stones from Garraf and the work of the workers, cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, and sculptors who participated were paid entirely with the fortune that Josep Guardiola i Grau had made with coffee in Guatemala and with his investments in the Panama Canal.
Roser Segimon lived the rest of her life in La Pedrera. She died there in June 1964. She was 93 years old. It had been 23 years since she had been widowed by Pere Milà and 63 years since she had buried her first husband, with whom she had, by express wish before her death, wanted to be buried in the L’Aleixar cemetery.
History of Guatemalan Coffee by Regina Wagner, Cristóbal von Rothkirch;
The Inheritance of the Indian by JOSEP MARIA HUERTAS
L’Aleixar by Fina Anglès and Joan-Miquel Ventós
Isabel Goig Soler
Ajuntament de L’Aleixar