The Town Hall celebrates 75 years

Many thanks to Pascual Segura for this fascinating account.

Until the 1940s, Bigastro Town Hall was located at number 12 in the Plaza de la Constitución, a space that today is occupied by a modern building of housing and commercial premises. The poor condition of that old building of 165 m2, which included the jail and open courtyard, led to the consistory commission in 1942 to the two expert masons, Joaquin Moya Martinez and José Alcaina Esteban, a report on the state of municipal buildings .

The report, presented in 1943, ruled the poor state in which they were, and for that reason the mayor, Manuel Fuentes Torres, made the decision to auction all the municipal properties to deal with the acquisition of a space that would serve as new Town Hall.

Thanks to the money raised from the auctions, the house of the then secretary of the Town Hall of Bigastro, Juan Gálvez Gálvez, was purchased for 40,000 pesetas, commissioning the project of adaptation of said house to the architect Severiano Sánchez Ballesta, who approved the acquisition of the property affirming that "the structure of the building, its architectural style and the consistency of its walls and work in general, are well designed".

In August of that same year of 1943 they began works that culminated in December to adapt the house of the secretary to a Town Hall, with offices, court, archive, plenary hall, etc. In June 1944 the building was ready for the workers to make use of their facilities.

From June 1944 until today 75 years have passed. A work of adaptation of an old house to which subsequent rehabilitation works followed.

Over the course of those 75 years, Bigastro has travelled a path of prosperity, improvements in infrastructure and services, social and cultural advances, etc. A path that prospers with a newly named Municipal Corporation, which has as its Mayor-President, Teresa María Belmonte Sánchez and the councillors Antonio José Meseguer Cabañés, Alejandra Moya Celedonio, José Manuel Maíquez Moya, Nuria Andreu Mompeán, Manu Giménez Terrés, Teresa Moya Moya, Mª Carmen Medina Oltra, Raúl Martínez Campos, Olga Soto Pardo, Joaquín Sáez López, Nora Taj Lidón and Aurelio Murcia González, to the municipal representatives in charge of protecting this anniversary.