Enriqueta Martí ran a gruesome child trafficking and murder operation in early 20th century Spain, leaving a dark shadow which still haunts the city.
On February 10, 1912, Barcelona police burst into apartment number 29 at Calle Poniente (now Carrer de Joaquín Costa) and witnessed a scene that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Inside the dimly lit flat, they discovered two disoriented children—Teresita Guitart, a recently kidnapped 5-year-old girl whose disappearance had mobilized the city, and another younger child in a terrible state of malnutrition. But what truly horrified the officers were the grisly contents found throughout the apartment: human bones stripped of flesh, jars containing preserved human remains, bottles of congealed blood, and containers of human fat. Strands of children's hair hung from the ceiling like macabre decorations. Hidden compartments revealed children's clothing, some stained with blood, others neatly folded, apparently kept as trophies.
The apartment belonged to Enriqueta Martí i Ripollés, a 45-year-old woman who had been living a double life. By day, she dressed in rags and begged in the city's poorest neighborhoods, often with different children in tow. By night, she transformed into an elegantly dressed woman who moved comfortably among Barcelona's elite, selling her "miraculous remedies" made from the most unthinkable ingredients: the blood, fat, and bones of children she had abducted and murdered.
Barcelona in the Early 1900s: A City of Stark Contrasts
To understand how Enriqueta Martí operated undetected for years, one must understand Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century. The capital of Catalonia was a city of profound contradictions during La Belle Époque. While the upper classes enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and the city showcased Antoni Gaudí's architectural marvels, Barcelona also harbored some of Spain's most desperate poverty.
The rapid industrialization of Catalonia had drawn thousands of rural migrants to Barcelona, creating overcrowded slums where families lived in squalid conditions. The district of Raval, where Martí conducted much of her grim business, was a labyrinth of narrow streets teeming with the destitute, prostitutes, and criminals. Child mortality rates were staggeringly high, and abandoned children were a common sight on the streets.
Barcelona's social structure was rigidly hierarchical. The wealthy industrial bourgeoisie and aristocracy lived entirely separate lives from the working classes. This separation created the perfect environment for someone like Martí to operate in both worlds without detection.
The period was also marked by widespread belief in folk remedies and esoteric treatments among all social classes. Even educated, wealthy Barcelonians often sought alternative cures for ailments conventional medicine couldn't address. Tuberculosis, cancer, and venereal diseases were rampant and often incurable by the medical standards of the time, creating a desperate market for miracle cures.
In early 20th century Spain, superstition and medicine were still deeply intertwined. Among certain segments of society, particularly the older aristocracy, there persisted the medieval belief that consuming human blood or organs could cure serious illnesses and restore youth and vitality. This belief, combined with the desperate fear of terminal diseases, created a market for the horrific "remedies" Enriqueta Martí provided to her wealthy clients.
The Making of a Monster
Enriqueta Martí was born in 1868 in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, a small town near Barcelona. Her early life gave little indication of the monster she would become. She grew up in a peasant family and moved to Barcelona as a young woman seeking better opportunities, like thousands of other rural Catalans.
Her descent into depravity began when she turned to prostitution to support herself in the city. Eventually, as she aged and could no longer attract clients, she became a procuress—someone who finds prostitutes for clients—and began to specialize in providing children to pedophiles among Barcelona's wealthy elite.
This criminal enterprise gave Martí connections to both the city's underworld and its upper echelons. She learned to navigate between these worlds, adapting her appearance and manner to blend into whatever environment served her purpose. She developed a network of informants who would alert her to vulnerable children—those who were homeless, orphaned, or whose impoverished parents wouldn't ask too many questions if they disappeared.
By the early 1900s, Martí had expanded her criminal activities. Drawing on folk superstitions and the desperate desire for miracle cures among the wealthy, she began presenting herself as a curandera (folk healer) with secret remedies for otherwise incurable diseases. Her "medicines"—unbeknownst to most of her clients—contained human ingredients harvested from kidnapped children.
A Reign of Terror
Enriqueta Martí's criminal activities fell into three horrific categories: kidnapping children, prostituting them to pedophiles, and murdering them to use their remains in her "medicinal" preparations.
Her modus operandi for abductions was simple but effective. Dressed in ragged clothes, she would wander through the poorest neighborhoods of Barcelona, particularly Raval, appearing as just another destitute woman. She would approach children playing unsupervised in the streets or offer small amounts of money to desperately poor parents in exchange for taking their children "into service" at a wealthy home. Many parents, unable to feed their children and believing they were giving them a chance at a better life, accepted these offers.
Once in her possession, the children faced one of two fates. Those considered attractive would be cleaned up and forced into prostitution, offered to pedophiles among Barcelona's wealthy elite. These "sessions" took place in various apartments Martí maintained around the city, never in her main residence. She charged exorbitant prices for these services, building considerable wealth that she carefully concealed.
The children who weren't used for prostitution, or who had outlived their "usefulness" in that role, met an even more terrible fate. Martí would murder them—usually by slitting their throats to collect their blood—and then methodically harvest their bodies for ingredients for her potions and powders.
In her main apartment, she had created a makeshift laboratory where she processed human remains. She extracted blood and preserved it, rendered fat from body parts, ground bones into powder, and even prepared entire organs for various "medicinal" preparations. These concoctions were sold to wealthy clients as cures for tuberculosis, cancer, and other serious illnesses. Some preparations were also marketed as beauty treatments or potency enhancers.
Did You Know? Enriqueta Martí kept meticulous records of her "business," including a client book containing names of prominent Barcelona citizens who purchased her human-derived "remedies." This book mysteriously disappeared during the investigation, leading to speculation about police corruption and protection of elite clients.
The exact number of Martí's victims remains unknown. Police discovered remains from at least a dozen different children in her apartment, but given that she had operated for years and would have disposed of most evidence, the actual count is likely much higher. Some historical estimates suggest she may have been responsible for the deaths of 40 or more children over a period of 20 years.
Her crimes went undetected for so long in part because she targeted the most vulnerable children in society—those from the poorest families, orphans, and street children whose disappearances would rarely be reported or investigated. When parents did report missing children, police typically dismissed these cases as runaways or assumed the children had succumbed to the diseases that regularly swept through Barcelona's slums.
A Missing Girl Breaks the Case
The beginning of the end for Enriqueta Martí came when she kidnapped Teresita Guitart Congost, a 5-year-old girl from a working-class family, on February 10, 1912. Unlike many of Martí's previous victims, Teresita came from a stable, albeit modest, family who immediately reported her disappearance and persistently pressured authorities to find her.
The Guitart family plastered the neighborhood with handmade posters, and the case began receiving unprecedented public attention. The newspaper La Vanguardia published the story, creating the first major public campaign to find a missing child in Spanish history.
Twelve days after Teresita's disappearance, a woman named Claudia Elías was visiting her neighbor Enriqueta Martí when she glimpsed a little girl who matched the widely distributed description of Teresita. Suspicious, Elías reported what she had seen to the police.
On February 27, 1912, police officers led by Chief Inspector Ribot raided Martí's apartment. They found not only Teresita—alive but disoriented and with her hair cut short in an attempt to disguise her—but also the horrific evidence of Martí's other crimes: human remains, bloodstained children's clothing, and her workshop for creating her macabre "medications."
Martí was immediately arrested, and as investigators processed the crime scene, the full extent of her depravity began to emerge. They discovered account books detailing transactions with wealthy clients, multiple identities and disguises, and addresses of other properties she maintained around Barcelona.
A search of these other locations uncovered evidence of her child prostitution ring, including a list of clients that allegedly contained names of prominent Barcelona citizens. This list would later become a source of controversy when it disappeared from police evidence.
Did You Know? The investigation of Enriqueta Martí's crimes was one of the first major cases in Spain to use systematic forensic techniques. Police photographed the crime scene extensively and had medical experts analyze the human remains to determine how many victims were represented and how they had died—pioneering approaches for Spanish law enforcement in 1912.
Aftermath
The "Vampire of Barcelona" never faced trial for her crimes. Following her arrest, she was imprisoned at the Reina Amalia prison while investigators built their case. The public reaction was one of unprecedented outrage. Crowds gathered outside the jail calling for her immediate execution, and newspapers published lurid accounts of her crimes, some factual, others embellished.
As the investigation continued through 1912 and into 1913, authorities uncovered more evidence connecting Martí to disappearances of children dating back years. They identified at least six children who had been in her possession at various times and subsequently disappeared. Medical experts confirmed that the human remains in her apartment came from multiple victims of different ages.
The case took an unexpected turn on September 12, 1913, when Enriqueta Martí was found dead in her prison cell. She had been brutally attacked by other inmates who, despite their own criminal backgrounds, were horrified by her crimes against children. She died of wounds sustained in this attack, never having stood trial or revealed the full extent of her crimes.
Her death cut short the investigation, leaving many questions unanswered. How many children had she killed over the years? Who were all her wealthy clients? Were there accomplices who were never identified? The most disturbing possibility—that some powerful figures in Barcelona society might have protected her—remained unresolved.
The Enriqueta Martí case led to significant reforms in how missing children cases were handled in Spain. Police departments established specialized protocols for child disappearances, and newspapers began more systematic reporting of missing children. These changes may have saved countless lives in the decades that followed.
Legacy of the Vampire
The case of Enriqueta Martí left an indelible mark on Barcelona and Spain as a whole. In the immediate aftermath, it exposed the vast gulf between the city's wealthy and poor, and the vulnerability of children in a society that often overlooked their welfare.
More concretely, the case prompted some of Spain's first child protection laws. In the years following Martí's crimes, authorities implemented stricter oversight of orphanages and created new social welfare programs aimed at protecting vulnerable children. The practice of informally "adopting" or taking in children as servants became subject to legal scrutiny, closing one of the loopholes Martí had exploited.
The case also changed policing practices in Barcelona. For the first time, missing children reports were taken seriously regardless of the social status of the family reporting the disappearance. A specialized division focused on crimes against children was eventually established within the police force.
In Spanish culture, Enriqueta Martí became a boogeyman figure—"la vampira del carrer Ponent" (the vampire of Ponent Street)—used to warn children not to talk to strangers. Her crimes were so shocking that they entered the realm of urban legend, with the factual horror sometimes embellished in the retelling.
The physical remnants of the case have largely disappeared from modern Barcelona. The building at Calle Poniente (now Joaquín Costa) where she committed her crimes was eventually demolished, though the street itself remains a busy thoroughfare in what is now a revitalized part of the city center. The Reina Amalia prison where she died was converted into a cultural center, with few visitors aware of its connection to one of Spain's most notorious criminals.
Where Are They Now? Teresita Guitart, the little girl whose kidnapping led to Martí's capture, survived the ordeal and was reunited with her family. She lived a quiet life afterward, rarely speaking publicly about her experience, and passed away in the 1990s. The fate of the other child found in Martí's apartment remains largely unknown to history, though records suggest the child was eventually placed in an orphanage.
Archaeological excavations in Barcelona occasionally uncover human remains that prompt speculation about additional victims of Martí who were never discovered. In 2012, during renovations near one of her known residences, workers found human bones that forensic analysis determined belonged to children from approximately the right time period, though a definitive connection to Martí could not be established.
The story of Barcelona's vampire has experienced a revival of interest in recent decades, with several books, documentaries, and even a film exploring the case. These modern examinations often focus not just on Martí's crimes but on the social conditions that enabled them—the extreme inequality, child exploitation, and superstition that pervaded early 20th century Barcelona.
Today, more than a century after her crimes, Enriqueta Martí remains one of Spain's most notorious criminals—a figure whose real-life atrocities surpassed any fictional horror and whose case continues to fascinate and disturb new generations of true crime enthusiasts.
