Village
Sabadell is the textile capital city of Vallès Occidental, co-capital of the comarca together with Terrassa, with 225,368 inhabitants (INE 2025), which makes it the fifth-largest municipality in Catalonia. A pioneer of the Catalan industrial revolution, by the mid-19th century it was Spain's most important wool city and was known as “the Catalan Manchester”; from that era it preserves numerous chimneys and steam mills, many now converted into social facilities, forming a rich modernist and industrial heritage. It lies at the center of the comarca, beside the Ripoll river, which according to one theory gave rise to its name, from the ford that allowed it to be crossed. Its coat of arms, with an onion and the four bars of Aragon, recalls its former membership of the Crown of Aragon.
Monument
The Torre d'en Feu, or castle of Can Feu, is a building in the Sabadell neighborhood of the same name, declared Bien Cultural de Interés Nacional (Spain's highest level of heritage protection), where a guided tour is held every first Sunday of the month. Excavations in 2009 uncovered the remains of a 12th-13th-century defensive tower, identified with the Torre de Sobarber, already documented in 1055; after a fire it came to be called Torre Cremada, and later Torre Vallcorba, until in 1674 it was acquired by the Feu family, who gave it its present name and, ennobled in 1686, gradually enlarged it. In 1878 its owner left in his will the obligation to build a family pantheon, which led to remodeling the building to give it the appearance of a medieval castle, works that remained unfinished in 1901; in 1904 it was incorporated into the municipality of Sabadell.
Monument
The castle of Ribatallada, today a half-ruined farmhouse, stands atop a hill beside the stream of the same name, near Sant Julià d'Altura. Its irregular floor plan is the result of adaptation to the terrain and successive extensions over the centuries; in the northwest section remain the ruins of a battered wall, built of rounded stones laid in regular courses, which may correspond to a stretch of the original castle wall. It is first documented in 1136, when the Count of Barcelona Ramon Berenguer IV granted it in fief, together with other castles, to the seneschal Guillem Ramon. His descendants kept it until 1310, when it passed to the Clasqueri family, and later to the Togores, a lineage that died out at the end of the 15th century.
Monument
Manor house of the 16th and 17th centuries, today the tourist office of Sabadell.
Monument
Castellarnau, also known as Torre Berardo, is a manor farmhouse in Sabadell, in the Vallès Occidental, probably built between the 13th and 14th centuries. It has two floors and a seventeen-metre square tower added in 1570 for defensive purposes, together with a chapel from 1629 facing it; today it serves as a restaurant. It belonged for more than a century to the Borrell family, who in 1575 built the present tower following a dispute with the owners of the neighbouring Can Maduixer over who would raise the more slender tower, a wager that ruined the Borrells. In 1622 the estate was sold to the Genoese Francisco Berardo, from whom it took its other name, and in 1648 it passed to Joan Martí, of Barcelona, with hardly any changes since.
Monument
The Molí d'en Mornau, or Molí de Ca l'Estruc, is one of the most emblematic industrial buildings in Sabadell and is declared a cultural asset of national interest. On this site there was an old paper mill documented in the mid-16th century, which in time became a cloth mill, a forge and a gunpowder mill, until in 1783 Antoni Amat converted it into a paper mill, devoted to making cigarette paper; it took its first name from his son-in-law, Josep Francesc Mornau. In the early 19th century textile activities were introduced there, replacing paper manufacturing by the end of that century. It has four floors and a basement, with the two upper floors full of windows, formerly used for drying paper, which earned it the name of the mill with as many windows as the year has days.
Monument
The Casal Antoni Casanovas, on Carrer de Sant Antoni in Sabadell, was built in 1859 by the textile businessman Antoni Casanovas i Bosch, who had been mayor of the city several times. Casanovas began as a self-employed weaver and in 1848 built the so-called Vapor d'en Rovira, one of the most important textile establishments of the Sabadell of that time; in 1863 he took part in the founding of the Institut Industrial de Sabadell and was one of the promoters of the Teatro Principal. The building that bears his name later housed the Court of First Instance, the Sabadell Savings Bank and the Industrial School, and today it is the seat of the city's History Museum.
Monument
The Torre de l'Aigua is a former modernist water tower located in the east of Sabadell, beside the river Ripoll, which has become the city's most emblematic and identifying building. It was built between 1916 and 1918 to a design by the architect Lluís Homs, with engineering by Francesc Izard and under the direction of Josep Renom, and was one of the first reinforced-concrete works in Sabadell, a technique that made it possible to raise a slender structure capable of holding up the tank. It functioned as such between 1922 and 1967, is listed as a cultural asset of local interest and appears among the hundred Elements of the Industrial Heritage of Catalonia; it can be visited during the Festa Major, the first weekend of September.
Monument
The building was designed as the headquarters of the Caixa d'Estalvis de Sabadell, the oldest Catalan savings bank, founded on 6 January 1859 by a group of Sabadell residents led by the industrialist Pere Turull and his son Pau. Its head office stood in the city centre, in one of the most representative buildings of Modernisme in the textile Vallès. The institution, devoted to promoting savings and social welfare work, came to have more than 600,000 customers and more than 360 branches; in 2010 it merged with Caixa Terrassa and Caixa Manlleu into Unnim, which in 2013 passed into the BBVA network.
Monument
The Arimon house, in Sabadell, was built in 1858 by the architect Josep Renom i Costa for the bourgeois Arimon family, and was radically transformed between 1911 and 1929, in the renovation that gave it its present appearance. It is a mansion with a ground floor, upper floor and attic, with a square tower resembling a fortified house, a trilobed arch doorway and wrought-iron grilles on windows and balconies. Some of the best workshops of the period worked on the 1911 renovation: the stained-glass windows, influenced by those of the Palau de la Música Catalana, are attributed to the Rigalt i Granell workshop, the sgraffito to the Butsems i Fradera workshop and the ironwork to the Ballarín workshop. Since 1941 it has belonged to the Garcia-Planas family, who, after a restoration, reopened it in 2008 as a health and wellness centre.
Nature
The Ripoll rises in the sot del Galí, in the Serra de Granera, at 640 metres above sea level, within the municipality of Sant Llorenç Savall, and runs for 39.2 kilometres until it joins the Besòs at Montcada i Reixac, passing through Sant Feliu del Racó, Castellar del Vallès, Sabadell, Barberà del Vallès and Ripollet. Along its course it powered flour mills for centuries which, from the 18th century onwards, were gradually converted into paper mills, and in the 20th century it saw strong growth in textile businesses that seriously polluted its waters. On 25 September 1962 a torrential rainfall of 225 litres per square metre caused a catastrophic flood that left close to a thousand dead in the Vallès Occidental.
Activity
The Festa Major of Sabadell counts among its symbols three pairs of giants. Els Avis, the oldest, were built in 1929 at El Ingenio in Barcelona and made their debut at that same edition of the festival, originally representing the Catholic Monarchs. Els Ducs, Roger and Elisenda, arrived in 1956, the work of Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, and els Pubills, Feliu and Salut, were bought in 1969.
Monument
Former cemetery of Sabadell, with Modernista and Noucentista pantheons.
Curiosity
Gastronomic tradition of hearty breakfasts of beans, broad beans or chickpeas served mid-morning in the bars of Sabadell.
Historical milestone
The Gremi de Fabricants de Sabadell, the employers' association of the local wool textile industry, is heir to the old Gremi de Paraires documented in 1559, which founded the Confraria de Sant Roc i Sant Sebastià in 1566. After a long crisis caused by the freedom-of-work provisions of the Cortes of Cádiz, the structure of the old guild served in 1879 as the basis for a modern employers' association that drove institutions such as the Unió Llanera Espanyola in 1881 -the year in which its members also founded the Banc Sabadell-, the Cambra Oficial de Comerç i Indústria in 1886 and the Unió Industrial in 1899. From its earlier initiative also arose the Institut Industrial de Sabadell in 1863, with industrial education courses and the newspaper El Eco del Vallés, published until 1872.
Historical milestone
The installation of the first steam engine in 1838 set off the textile take-off that made Sabadell the leading wool centre of the State and earned it the nickname of the Catalan Manchester. The chimneys of the steam mills marked its profile for more than a century.
Historical milestone
Local industrialists and merchants founded the Banc de Sabadell in 1881 to finance the purchase of raw materials for the wool industry, twenty-two years after the Caixa d'Estalvis de Sabadell, created in 1859. The institution is today one of the great Spanish banks.
Activity
Raised between 1928 and 1930 by the municipal architect Josep Renom in a noucentista key, with a central hall 22 metres high and a dome on an octagonal base. Refurbished in 2004, it remains the benchmark market for the city's fresh produce.