The Monforte toy shop closes

And we carry on saying goodbye to Barcelona’s iconic shops, which can’t keep up with the new rents. This time it’s the Monforte toy shop, on Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol, opposite Santa Maria del Pi.

Tomorrow, the 5th, the eve of Three Kings’ Day (when children here get their presents), will be the last day the shop opens to the public. A sad farewell, Mercè tells us. She’s the Monfortes’ daughter-in-law and has spent 40 years behind the counter, serving customers with that trademark smile of hers.

The shop opened its doors in 1840, and four generations have passed through it since, selling all kinds of toys and games, from jigsaws, playing cards, dolls and board games to fabulous billiard tables (Billar de Precisión Monforte-Domingo). In fact, Mercè’s father-in-law, Domingo Monforte, was world billiards champion in the 1950s.

Today we popped into the shop to see what we could take home as a keepsake, and we got chatting to Mercè. By pure chance we found out that a first cousin of my father’s had worked in the shop for years, and from our surnames Mercè remembered my grandfather, ‘un senyor molt alt, molt elegant amb pajarita’ (a very tall, very elegant gentleman in a bow tie), she told us, who had come into the shop so many times, especially at Christmas, to buy presents for his grandchildren.

Resigned to it, Mercè is selling off the whole shop day by day at very competitive prices. She’s even selling the furniture! My brother has taken home a sweet little stool, where the shop assistants used to take the weight off their feet. How many tired bottoms must it have seated!

It makes me sad to say goodbye to the small, old-established shops we’ve always known. Little memories that fade away with change, with time, with each generation… and there’ll come a time when nobody remembers them.

Mercè tells us it’s going to become a chocolate shop, which will keep the floor tiles and some of the woodwork from the current shop. Let’s hope the change isn’t too devastating, and that a little billiard cue will hang on a wall in memory of the old business, which lasted 173 years.