The Hidden Histories of el Patio Carreras

As part of the significant effort of the Ministry for Heritage of Gibraltar to recover historical and cultural memory, it has for some time now been installing information plaques concerning the Rock’s famous historical episodes and figures, as well as signs with the names of some city streets as they are (or were) known by the local population. Among these latter ceramic plaques placed on a hundred street corners of the city are Detrás de la Iglesia (Cannon Lane), the Qwary (Camp Bay), the Callejón de las Siete Revueltas (City Mill Lane), the Cuesta de Mr. Bourne (Flat Bastion Road), and Calle Real (Main Street), in addition to Carrera’s Passage, a narrow town-centre alley more popularly known as el Patio Carreras.

In A Rocky Labyrinth, the exhaustive street guide published by Manolo Galliano in 2022, we discover that the name ‘Carrera’s Passage’ first appeared in the register of inhabitants of 1871. Three years earlier, in the 1868 census, we find precisely a handful of bearers of this surname around the area of el Patio Carreras: at No 3 Turnbull’s Lane, for example, there lived Cristóbal Carreras Bandrell, 61, from Mahon, with his second wife, Maria Butler, born in the far-off lands of Newfoundland; and at least five of his children lived at number 24.

However, according to the information provided by the ministry itself about the passage, the name is likely much older and probably comes, in fact, from a tobacconist, Francis Carreras, who, according to the 1816 register of inhabitants, had arrived in Gibraltar at the end of the 18th Century and resided at 12 Engineer Lane along with his wife Mary and their two children. His tobacco workshop seems to have been on the southern corner of the current Carrera’s Passage with Engineer Lane, and the family residence occupied the second floor. On the first floor, as was common in this widespread subsistence activity at the beginning of the 19th Century in Gibraltar, there was a warehouse where tobacco bales were stored. The sacks were hoisted with a wall crane like the one that can still, in fact, be seen at the entrance to Carrera’s Passage.

THE EARLIEST CARRERAS

Although the origin of the alley’s name can be traced to the beginning of the 19th Century, it should be noted that the Carreras lineage had been in Gibraltar since the preceding century, practically coinciding with the Habsburg occupation of the fortress during the War of Succession. 

In a marriage document preserved in the archives of Saint Mary the Crowned dated 13 October 1711, a certain Antonio Carreras, a native of Petra (Mallorca), married Gràcia Corrons, a Catalan, daughter of Josep Corrons, ‘sargento maior desta plasa.’ The two witnesses to the marriage were Alonso de la Capela, ‘alcalde maior de esta plasa,’ and Fray Miguel Vallés. Bearing in mind that in 1711 Gibraltar was still officially a Habsburg possession and only unofficially British, the figures in this document demonstrate, on the one hand, the important position that Antoni Carreras must have occupied in the incipient Gibraltarian society which took root after the exodus of the old Andalusian population and, on the other, his undeniable support for the cause of the House of Austria in the War of the Spanish Succession.

In fact, the Catalan Josep Corrons, the bride’s father, was involved in the occupation of the Rock alongside Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-Dutch expedition of August 1704. After the first Franco-Spanish siege of 1705, Prince George and the three hundred Catalan volunteers who had accompanied him left Gibraltar to ignite the Habsburg spark in both Valencia and Catalonia. However, he left as representatives of the Archduke’s interests some of his most trusted men in key positions in the city’s new civil (or political) administration, as local historian Richard Garcia confirmed in an interview: ‘The Catalans played an important role during the years immediately after the capture in what was an attempt to fill the void left by the exodus. The mayor, the councillors, all of them left … They had to start over.’

Corrons, in this sense, was the first captain of the port of Gibraltar, from 1705 until well after the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, when the territory officially passed to Great Britain. Another Catalan, Alonso de la Capela, was appointed by the Archduke to serve as judge. In addition to these two heavyweights of the administration established by Prince George before his departure, the presence in the marriage document as a witness of Fray Miquel Vallés, a Franciscan who had probably left Valencia as a result of the Borbón occupation of the Kingdom of Valencia in 1707, further makes clear Carreras’s Habsburg positioning.

From 1711, therefore, the times the name of the notable Mallorcan appeared in local documents and records do no more than confirm the prominence he acquired among the growing civilian population throughout the 18th Century. In 1733, at the marriage of his daughter Francisca to Joan Canals, a Mallorcan like himself, the name of Pedro de Salas, who held the important position of Spanish sergeant, stands out as one of the witnesses to it. Moreover, in 1746, Maria Gracia Carreras, another daughter of his, married Pedro Juan de Salas, son of the aforementioned Pedro de Salas. Three years earlier, Beatriz Carreras had become engaged at only fourteen years old to the Genoese Nicolas Quartin, who was destined to be a prominent member of the local Catholic community. Then on 21 May 1756, at the wedding of Maria Blanca Carreras to another Genoese, one of the witnesses was none other than Bartolomé Danino, consul of Genoa in the city. 

On just reading through the parish records and books, it is an enormous surprise to see the large number of contacts that Antoni Carreras established in the fortress. Following up the names that appear in his family’s baptisms and weddings, we discover that, in addition to interacting with influential people in the city, this skilled businessman from Mallorca had a direct relationship with the vast majority of Catalans and Valencians present during the 18th Century in Gibraltar. Thus, tracking his entries from document to document between 1722 and 1761, he is seen to be linked with the Valencians Damià Capsir and Francesc Vallés (undoubtedly related to Fray Miquel Vallés), the Catalan couple Josep Gatell and Joana Canals, Thomas Porro (from Alicante of Genoese origin, father of the future bishop Francisco Porro), Miquel Riera, who was also Catalan, and his wife Tecla Porta from Mahon, the Valencian Francesc Mayor and his Menorcan wife, Margarida Trémol, the Catalans Lluís del Valle [sic], Josep Portas and Jaume Joan Lluís Socias, the Menorcan Esteve Vacarisas and also with Gabriel Coll, son of a Catalan and a Menorcan.

The blood ties and the close contact he had with the most prominent personalities of Gibraltar’s microsociety in the first decades of British rule undoubtedly helped consolidate Carreras as a prominent businessman in a fortress where there were often shortages in supplies. The link by marriage with Corrons, the ‘alcaide’ or captain of the port of Gibraltar from 1705 to 1719 whose family origins were in Mataró, is a reminder that he was involved in the commercial activity of the city precisely at a time when some great Habsburg families from the Mataró area near Barcelona had launched the Companyia Nova de Gibaltar with the intention of breaking Cádiz’s monopoly and being able to trade with ports on both sides of the Atlantic through Gibraltar. The company, which was active between 1707 and 1714, even had a permanent agent in the fortress: c/o Josep Valls.

There are more clues to be found about the businesses Carreras was involved in. In 1732, after the second great Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar, we know from historian Ricard Cantano that he was co-owner (with Thomas Porro) of a Catalan pink captained by a sailor from Canet, Gabriel Catà. Cantano himself, in fact, connects Antoni with the Carreras family of sailors and businessmen from that coastal town near Mataró, a hypothesis that could be partially confirmed by the wedding of one of his sons, José Antonio Carreras, to Francisca Catà, daughter of the aforementioned ship captain from Canet. 

Richard Garcia writing about Carreras’s commercial activity also mentions in his book Forging A Civilian Community (1704-1749) that in November 1735, together with the Valencian Francesc Mayor, he bought a French ship that had sunk just in front of the South Mole. According to Garcia, ‘[t]he ship could not be salvaged and the vessel was valued at $550 including the yards, rigging, masts and timbers.’ The Governor of Gibraltar, General Sabine, ordered it to be sold at auction in what today is John Mackintosh Square (the Piazza), but which during that time was popularly known as ‘El Martillo’ in reference to the auctioneers’ gavel (‘martillo’). A further clue that he enjoyed a comfortable economic position is that when Joan Canals, who was also Mallorcan, married to one of his daughters and owner of a merchant ship, died suddenly in 1736, he left a debt with his father-in-law of $153. 

Alongside the growth of his businesses, Antoni Carreras also accumulated properties in Gibraltar, a city under military siege from the outside and demographic pressure from the inside, given the limited living space available for a constantly increasing population. In a ‘list of inhabitants’ of 1736, his name appears linked to four houses. Moreover, in the famous property report prepared by General Humphrey Bland in 1749, Carreras defended the possession of several houses supposedly granted by Prince George himself in 1705 to his wife’s father, Josep Corrons.

FROM MALLORCA TO MENORCA … AND CATALONIA? 

Although Antoni Carreras and Gràcia Corrons had at least seventeen children between 1712 and 1739, when both died within weeks of each other in the winter of 1767-1768, the surname gradually disappeared from Gibraltar. A key reason is that they had more daughters than sons and, therefore, once married, they lost the family name. At least three of their descendants are registered in the 1777 census: Gabriel, a 53-year-old sailor; Antonio, 43, and Magdalena, 39. In each case, the official taking the census noted that they were part of the group of civilians evacuated in June 1779 due to the imminent Great Siege (1779-1783). Among the territories that welcomed a large proportion of the population was Menorca, then also under British rule. It is altogether plausible to imagine, then, that some of the Carreras took refuge there without ever thinking that the Borbón forces, faced with the difficulty of recovering Gibraltar, would soon afterwards choose to besiege the island from the summer of 1781 until its fall on 5 February 1782. 

Following the failure of the third Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar, many of the evacuees returned from various ports in England but more especially from the Mediterranean. There is evidence of at least two of his children present in the fortress after the Great Siege: Magdalena, who died in 1786, and Gabriel, the only bearer of the surname in the 1791 census. However, thanks to a death certificate from 1811, we know that another son of Antonio, Francis, married in 1761 to the Irish Luisa Wyth, also died in Gibraltar at 76 years of age from gangrene. 

As the Century turned, so the Carreras surname could also be said to have gone through a change: the predominantly Mallorcan line from the early 18th Century gave way to the branch from Menorca, represented primarily by two marriages. First, the marriage of Simon Carreras and Magdalena Cardona and, secondly, the marriage of Sebastià Carreras Seguí, ‘patron of a ferry boat,’ and Àgueda Bonet Soler. The Seguí couple, residing at least since 1793 in Gibraltar and married at the altar of Saint Mary the Crowned on 13 February 1798, went on to have a good number of children, including Francisco (1800), María (1802), Teresa (1804), Pedro (1808), and Anna (1812).

One might well ask: so, from which branch did the tobacconist who is considered to have given his name to the Patio Carreras come? Well, surprisingly, it seems it was neither from the Mallorcan nor the Menorcan families. In the aforementioned 1816 census it is worth noting that in the column concerning the nationality of Francis Carreras and his wife Mary, the recording official wrote ‘Spain’ rather than ‘Menorca’ or even ‘Majorca,’ as was usually the case with the numerous Menorcans and the few Mallorcans mentioned in that register. This detail becomes more relevant when in contemporary church archives, wherever Francisco Carreras and Maria Dolores Gómez appear, there is invariably mention of the fact that one is ‘native of the town of Reus’ and that the other is from Ronda. This is the case for the baptism of some of their children (such as Juan in 1812, Domingo in 1814, and María de la Concepción in 1815) as well as with regard to his own death on 18 February 1830, at just fifty years of age, from ‘henfermedad [sic] del pecho’ (chest illness or infection). 

Finally, it should be noted that another Francisco Carreras, merchant and broker, resided around 1834 in Road to the Lines and ‘[it] is possible that the latter might also have been a property owner of one of the buildings in this small alleyway,’ as Manolo Galliano speculates in his guide. Who knows? That could be a son of his or perhaps the aforementioned Simon Carreras – who was from Mahon like him. In any case, it would be the definitive confirmation that several generations and branches of the Carreras family contributed, to a greater or lesser extent, to forging history of this passage in the heart of the city full of Menorcan, Mallorcan and Catalan experiences (and memories). 

This article was translated from the original by Brian Porro.