El último día de la casa

Banking houses rarely die loudly. Brunet y Cía — heir of the firm two Catalan brothers founded in the 1790s — ended in August 1951 in a notary's office, absorbed by the Banco Zaragozano. Gárate wrote its one-line epitaph: «la desaparición, en Agosto de 1951, de Brunet y Cía, decana de la banca donostiarra… Con ella se cerraba también un capítulo importante de la vida económica de la ciudad.» This artifact traces the long descent — not a fall, but a slow settling — through the only numbers the house ever published.

I.The last expansion, 1892–1923

After the Patriarch's death (1892), Guillermo Brunet Bingley «el del Fomento» rebuilt the firm twice: as José Brunet y Cía (1889, ~2M ptas) and then, on 31-XII-1901, as Brunet y Cía, S. en C. with 4 million pesetas — textiles, banking and property under one roof, the house's historical peak. The 1916 renewal reduced capital to 3M; footnote 44 of Gárate lists the partners who had died in the interval — Emilia de Brunet Bermingham, Pedro Brunet, Joaquín Brunet Fernández Arroyave, Ubaldo Brunet Goitia, Benjamín Brunet Bermingham — a roll-call of the nineteenth century leaving. When Guillermo died in October 1923, «en la Banca de Brunet, donde se colocaron pliegos, hubo que tener abierta la casa hasta muy entrada la noche» — the city queueing at the counter to sign its condolences. The bank's council then: Torcuato Luca de Tena, José and Luis Gaytán de Ayala.

II.The Republic — strikes, floods and a seat in the Diputación

The July-2026 sweep of La Voz de Guipúzcoa restores the bank's last civic decade. In 1928–29 «la Casa Brunet y Compañía» stands among the city's banks as a public charity-collection house. In January 1930, a barge sets out from the Oria mill to rescue flood victims. That spring a Brunet sits as diputado provincial (Gobernación, Régimen Interior, Gota de Leche commissions) and speaks in the Diputación on «la educación del pueblo». And in June 1930 the Oria spinning mill faces its documented labor conflict — the workers' federation, the labor inspector, meetings in the «casa B[runet]» — the industrial century arriving at the family's door. Then, from 1931, the Consejo Superior Bancario printed what the family never had: quarterly balances, inscription nº 58.

III.War, silence, and the notary — 1936–1951

July 1936 broke the bank's world in two: La Voz de Guipúzcoa — the paper Guillermo had managed — was seized and gone by year's end; the city changed hands; the CSB series stops speaking for the house. The bank itself survived the war and the long autarky as what it had become: a small, liquid, provincial casa de banca in an era that was liquidating them. Spanish banking's concentration wave of the 1940s–50s — absorption after absorption of the small and the local — reached the Avenida in the summer of 1951. In August 1951 the Banco Zaragozano absorbed Brunet y Cía, and a razón social with roots in the 1790s went off the registry. The price was never printed; it lives in the escritura at the Registro Mercantil de Gipuzkoa and in the Zaragozano's 1951 Memoria — the file's named archival target.

What did not end: the Oria mill spun on — sold to the Azcárate in 1956, working until 1986, two centuries almost to the year after the founders came down from Copons; the buildings the Fomento raised still define the city; and the family had long since become its next thing — Madrid, ABC, Lima. The house closed. The line did not.