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Badalona

Anise del Mono VIDEO

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Badalona is one of the suburbs of Barcelona, and although that I was born in Barcelona, now I am living here, which is very well connected with Barcelona downtown.

Few years ago, in these lands that you can see in this video, we found petrol tanks and big industries; as the factory of Anis del Mono that you can see behind me. The industries were placed along the train line, the first in the Iberian Peninsula which connected Barcelona and Mataró 1948 (of the peninsula but not of Spain, since the first line of train of Spain was in Cuba 1838, a province of Spain back then).

The factory of Anis del Mono is the unique one that survive in this area, now a residential area as you can see. Most of the buildings of the industries has become schools, museums… but the factory of this liquor still produces, and it is the unique one that exists in the World.

Recently the Government and the City hall built the new seafront of Badalona (before we had just rocks and a small path here). In front of the factory Anis del Mono, we find the sculpture of a monkey (2011) by Susana Ruiz Blanch (monkey is mono in Catalan and Spanish). The monkey is the popular name for this anise liquor well know internationally (take a look at the bottle on the table in this sequence of “El Padrino”).

The sculpture is the Monkey designed in the label of the bottle, holding a bottle of this liquor, and surprise us to see that, from the very beginnings, the face of the monkey is human and besides the face of Charles Darwing who assured that humans come from monkeys.

Anís del Mono Factory

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The only existing factory of the anisette “Anís del Mono” is located in Badalona. It’s an 1870 modernist jewel and, you can not only visit it, but every year it produces more than 4 million of liters of that liquor well known throughout the World.

The factory was founded by José and Vicente Bosch brothers, when they joined and decided to re-locate here the distillation of different liquors which José produced since 1865 in another factory in the center of Badalona.The liquor which would get the fame was “Anisado Refinado Vicente Bosch” (the refined anisette Vicente Bosch) which is in fact the name of the product, but Badalona population knew it as “Anís del Mono” (The monkey’s anisette), due to Vicente Bosch used to have a monkey in the factory yard, animal quite exotic in that time. Such was that habit of calling the liquor with that name, that the monkey’s figure ended up on the bottle label, but with Darwin’s heat, because Darwin in 1859, with his masterwork “On the Origen of the Spices”, had ideas so strange like man come from the ape.

The catalane painter Ramon Casas was the artist of a lot of Modernist Posters at the moment, used by companies as advertising. Companies such as Anís del Mono (see picture); Codorniu; or Cacaolat.

Now, even though the factory belongs to Osborne Group, the liquor is produced in the same handicraft way and, besides, since this year “Aromes de Montserrat” (a liquor produced by the Benedictine monks of Montserrat) is produced also here.

To visit it