Igualada

The city consists of an old town, founded in the 11th century, with narrow and irregular streets, including the remains of a fortress and ramparts, plus a new surrounding town with regular and spacious streets and many fine houses. The city is 65 kilometres west of Barcelona and 20 kilometres west of the famous mountain and monastery of Montserrat. Igualada hosts the European Balloon Festival, the largest hot air balloon festival in Spain and one of the largest in Europe. It has taken place every year, since 1997, at the beginning of July. The city also hosts the Aerosport airshow, which takes place every year in April or May. The Igualada Leather Museum (Museu de la Pell d'Igualada) opened in 1954. It was the first leather museum in Spain and the third in Europe. The collections are displayed in two nearby buildings in Igualada: the "Cal Boyer" building, a former cotton textile factory from the late 19th century, and the "Cal Granotes" building, an 18th-century tannery. "Cal Granotes" displays two floors of a typical tannery: the ground floor, where the leather preparation and tanning was done, and the upper floor, where the leather was dried hanging from bars. In the early 18th century, the tanning workers from Igualada decided to leave the enclosure of the medieval walls and established new industries along a water pipe or irrigation ditch named "El Rec", already mentioned in 12th-century documents and previously used by mills. The ditch has a length of 3,049 metersand collects the Anoia river water from a lock.