When Joan Carulla Figueres turned the roof terrace of his Barcelona apartment into a garden, it was out of nostalgia for his rural origins. Sixty-five years later, the ecological concepts he has long followed have become commonplace, and he is acclaimed as a pioneer of organic farming.
Carulla, who celebrated his 100th birthday this year, is credited with creating the city’s first roof garden. However, his “allotment in the sky” boasts far more than the usual tomato plants and pots of geraniums. It is home to more than 40 fruit trees, vines that produce 100kg (220lbs) of grapes a year, olives, peaches, figs, garlic, aubergines and even potatoes. He is passionate about potatoes.
“The civil war [in Spain in the 1930s] made me a vegetarian, through necessity, then conviction, potato by potato,” he says. “For breakfast we ate potatoes, at lunchtime more potatoes with an egg I shared with my father. In the evening, potatoes with vegetables.”
Sitting beneath a grapevine on an upturned beer crate – his eyes bright and his hearing and memory astonishingly sharp – he reminisces about the world he grew up in and how he became interested in vegetarianism in the 1950s, when he moved to Barcelona from Juneda, a village with a harsh climate in the Catalan interior.
His approach to agriculture is what today we call organic, but Carulla insists he is not doing anything new and that poor farmers have always practised organic farming out of necessity.
“My grandparents had little land and no money for fertiliser,” he says. “They used animal and vegetable waste and straw. We lived a frugal life. We didn’t go hungry, we just lived.”
Like his forebears, Carulla makes compost from everything, including old magazines and thin wooden fruit boxes. “There’s almost nothing we don’t use, everything decomposes eventually.”
With his family and a team of builders from Juneda, he spent 14 years building the block of flats that he jokingly calls “our Sagrada Família”, after Barcelona’s celebrated basilica, which took decades to build and is still incomplete.
They strengthened the terrace with a double layer of tiles and sheets of impermeable material, and installed an undersoil drainage network to cope with 70 tonnes of soil, 25cm (10in) deep. They created a system for collecting and storing 9,500 litres of rainwater so there are reserves in dry periods, though this has barely sufficed during Catalonia’s drought, which has lasted for nearly three years.
On his long journey through life, Carulla has been recording his thoughts on a manual Olivetti typewriter, for which his son Toni has had to scour the city to find replacement ribbons.
These musings have now been collected in a book, Mi siglo verde (My Green Century) by Carlos Fresneda, the London correspondent of El Mundo newspaper. In it, Carulla ranges over topics including vegetarianism, what makes a good potato, the agrochemical giant Monsanto, genetically modified plants and Spain’s civil war. He also tells his story in a video made by a Barcelona documentary company, Otoxo Productions, shown above.
If the war made him a vegetarian, it also made him a pacifist. He was 15 when Juneda was bombed and strafed by fascist warplanes. Carulla speaks with sorrow of the 117 people killed in the village and how the reprisals carried out by both sides at the end of the war broke his father’s spirit and drove his mother to an early grave.
“She was one of the war’s silent victims,” he says. “I think she died from pain and suffering.”
He also talks about how at the age of 10 he had an epiphany when he vowed to become un generador de amor (someone who generates love). “I don’t know where this phrase came from, but I decided that what I had to do was to create love in everyone, universal love.”
He attributes his longevity to never having smoked or drunk alcohol, as well as to a vegetarian diet and “because I have always enjoyed my work, as a small businessman and farmer, in daily contact with my beloved plants, and because I have banished envy and hatred from my mind”.
“I’ve lived in the city for almost 70 years but I’ve got farmer’s hands, and I’m proud of that,” he says, “although it seems that, after so many years working the soil, my hands weren’t made for scrolling on a mobile phone.”
One of his great joys is when schools organise visits to his garden. “Over the past 15 years dozens of children have passed through here. It was a dream of mine when I started this allotment, to create a slice of the countryside in the city to teach children how to love plants.”
• This article was amended on 26 June 2023 to credit Otoxo Productions as the makers of the video about Joan Carulla, shown above.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features
