BANC DE FELANITX

This is the old bank of Felanitx on the market street. It was founded in 1883 as a joint stock company with a capital of 636,500 pesetas, constituted with 1,273 shares of 500 pesetas each. For the first fourteen years, its headquarters were located in the premises of the Institute of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce (Ateneu d’agricultura, indústria y comerç) in Can Manuel d'es Sitjar, where they had also planned to found the bank. The first chairman was Miquel Reus Bennàsser, from 1883 to 1917. In 1897 the bank moved into its own building on the market street.

The building is an urban palace in eclectic style, designed by Antoni Vaquer Noguera in 1919. With the Gothic concept of the 16th and 17th century city palaces as a reference model, the room layout meets the requirements. Regarding the façade, aesthetic aspects predominate and the structural aspects are of secondary importance.

The strictly symmetrically structured façade is characterised by its plainness, the systematic arrangement of the window openings and ornamental simplicity. Although they left out the upper porch, typical for the construction of manor houses, there is another floor with the same layout as the lower floors. They adhered to the conventional construction of ground floor and two storeys above.

The symmetry of the façade is interrupted and emphasised at the same time by the design of the central section, with greater ornamentation, which makes it stand out from the rest of the façade. In the central structure, the balcony on the first floor catches the eye, supported by ornate corbels and the door pilasters. The flattened, three-leaf arch that defines the window opening is the balcony's showpiece. That kind of plant ornaments with palmettes, as well as their repetition as a decorative element on the entire façade, are clearly in the line with neo-Greek historicism. The sculptor Antoni Vaquer, commissioned by the architect M. Rigo, had already worked on buildings such as the Banco Balear in Palma (1870), in neo-Greek style and with the same kind of palmette-shaped plant ornaments. If we look at the arrangement of the curved elements on the façade of the Bank of Felanitx and at the floral decorations of the wrought ironwork, another influence closer to modernism comes to mind, and we can certainly confirm that the style of this building belongs to eclecticism.