La Vanguardia

• 1. Introduction

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  La Vanguardia has been publishing without interruption since the 1st of February 1881 - outlasting monarchies, dictatorships, civil war, and the death of democracy itself. That longevity alone would make it remarkable. But the real story of this Barcelona newspaper is stranger and more revealing than a simple tale of survival. How did a paper founded as a political tool for one faction of the Liberal Party become Catalonia's leading daily? How did it navigate decades of fascist rule, then quietly shift toward the centre? And what does it mean for a newspaper to publish the same edition in two languages at once, word for word, every single day? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Born in Barcelona

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  Carlos and Bartolomé Godó were businessmen from Igualada, not Barcelona, when they launched the paper in 1881. That detail matters. They arrived in the city with a specific purpose: to give a faction of the Liberal Party a platform from which to contest control of the Barcelona city council. The paper's original masthead described it as a "Diario político de avisos y notícias" - a Political Newspaper of Announcements and News. It was, in other words, an instrument before it was a journal.

  What the Godó brothers built, however, outlasted every political ambition that inspired it. La Vanguardia is one of the oldest papers in Spain still in print, and it is the only Catalan newspaper to have survived every regime change the country has seen - from the restoration of Alfonso XII in the nineteenth century through to the twenty-first. The Godó family never let go of the enterprise. Carlos Godó Valls took over the business in 1931, and when he died, his son Javier Godó Muntañola assumed the presidency in 1987, one year after the death of Carlos's wife, Montserrat Muntañola Trinxet.

• 3. Under Franco's Shadow

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  From 1939 to 1978, La Vanguardia carried the word Española in its title. That addition was not a coincidence. It was an accommodation to the ideology of Francoist Spain, a signal to the regime that the paper accepted the terms of the era. During those decades, La Vanguardia and ABC were the two major dailies operating under Francoism, a narrow field that carried its own pressures.

  The paper's editorial line today leans to the centre and describes itself as moderate. The Catholic sensibilities and the strong ties to the Spanish nobility, which run through the Godó family itself, remain part of the paper's character. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, as Spain transitioned to democracy, La Vanguardia developed close connections with the Convergence and Union alliance in Catalonia. In 1987, the paper received the second largest amount of state aid of any Spanish newspaper that year, a measure of its standing and its reach even as the political landscape around it transformed.

• 4. Design, Format, and Recognition

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  In 1994, the Society for News Design named La Vanguardia the World's Best Designed Newspaper. That award arrived at a moment when the paper was also the fourth best-selling newspaper in Spain, with a circulation of 207,112 copies. The two facts together - aesthetic distinction and commercial reach - marked a particular high point.

  The paper's physical format has not stayed fixed. Until the 2nd of October 2007, La Vanguardia was printed in berliner format, the medium-sized broadsheet associated with prestige European papers. On that date, it switched to tabloid. The shift reflected changes sweeping through print media worldwide, as publishers reconsidered the practicalities of size and portability. Despite the change in format, the paper has held its position as the fourth-highest circulation general-interest newspaper in Spain, behind only El País, El Mundo, and ABC - all three of which are national papers with offices and local editions across the country.

• 5. Circulation Over the Decades

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  In February 1970, La Vanguardia sold 221,451 copies. Five years later that figure stood at 218,390, and by February 1980 it had fallen to 188,555. The pattern of the paper's circulation across the following decades traces the pressures facing print journalism long before the internet arrived as a disruptive force.

  By 1993, copies sold had climbed back to 208,029, making it the fifth best-selling newspaper in Spain. In 2001 the figure was approximately 205,000; in 2003 it was roughly 203,000. Between June 2006 and July 2007 the daily averaged 209,735 copies. The 2008 figure rose to 213,413, and by 2011 the paper sold 196,824 copies. Across all these fluctuations, La Vanguardia remained the dominant paper in Catalonia, a region it serves more deeply than any of the Madrid-based nationals that outsell it across Spain as a whole.

• 6. Two Languages, One Newspaper

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  On the 3rd of May 2011, La Vanguardia began publishing a parallel Catalan-language edition alongside its Spanish one. The paper kept the Spanish name, La Vanguardia, for both editions rather than adopting L'Avantguarda, the direct Catalan translation. That choice was deliberate, a way of preserving brand recognition across both readerships.

  The logistics of running two daily editions rests on automation. La Vanguardia has been open about its use of an automatic translation tool, and the scale involved is striking: an average of 80,000 words are translated from Spanish to Catalan or vice versa each day. Before the Catalan edition launched, letters to the editor written in Catalan were left untranslated in the Spanish edition, a small but telling sign that the language was present in the paper's community even before it had a formal home there. The decision to launch a full Catalan edition placed La Vanguardia closer to the linguistic identity of Catalonia itself, where the paper has always been headquartered.

• 7. The Vanguardia Awards

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  The Premios Vanguardia were created in 2023 by the Godó Group to mark the 140th anniversary of the newspaper. The inaugural ceremony took place at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona, with King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain in attendance. Among the first recipients were physicist Ignacio Cirac, who won the Premio Innovación, and singer-songwriter Bad Gyal, who received the Premio Talento Joven Internacional.

  The awards returned in 2024, presented on the 16th of September by the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez. That year's winners included Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UNESCO, who received the Premio Sostenibilidad, and Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and president of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, who took the Premio Internacional. The Premio In Memoriam that year honoured Joan Oró, the biochemist, and the Premio Cultura went to writer Eduardo Mendoza. The jury for the awards includes prominent public figures alongside members of La Vanguardia's own editorial staff, a structure that keeps the newspaper at the centre of the ceremony bearing its name.