The Vampire of El Raval: A Tale of Myth, Misery, and Media Hysteria
At the beginning of the 20th century, Barcelona was a city torn between modernity and misery. The Raval neighborhood, then known as the "Chinese Quarter," concentrated an extreme density of poverty, prostitution, crime, and disease. It was in this dark setting, full of alleyways and tenement houses, that one of the most macabre and enduring myths in Spanish true crime history took shape: the story of Enriqueta Martí, dubbed by the press as the Vampire of El Raval.
Enriqueta Martí Ripollés was born in 1868 in Sant Feliu de Llobregat. She moved to Barcelona at a young age, where she led a wandering life marked by hardship, illness, and marginalization. It is known that she worked as a maid, seamstress, healer, and even a prostitute, living in modest apartments in Raval and Santa Madrona. Some sources portray her as a solitary, strange, and disheveled woman whose appearance fit perfectly with the image of the urban witch that the popular imagination was ready to believe in.
Her name made headlines on February 10, 1912, when she was arrested for the kidnapping of Teresita Guitart Congost, a five-year-old girl from a working-class family. Teresita had disappeared 17 days earlier and was recognized by a neighbor from a window. Police raided Enriqueta’s apartment on Ponent Street (now Joaquín Costa Street) and found the girl there, along with another child, Angelita, whom Enriqueta claimed was her daughter. The story could have remained just another kidnapping case, had it not been for what followed.
In the days after the arrest, the press unleashed a wave of lurid headlines that turned Enriqueta into a monstrous figure. She was accused not only of kidnapping children, but of murdering them, draining their blood, dismembering them, and using their fat, blood, and bones to make miraculous ointments for high-society clients. According to these reports, Enriqueta played the role of healer by day and child trafficker by night, running a child prostitution ring that allegedly catered to doctors, judges, and wealthy Barcelona elites.
Supposedly, during the search of her apartment, police found jars of coagulated blood, human hair, and bones (although none were ever confirmed to be from children), along with a notebook full of potion recipes. There were also girls’ dresses, little shoes, old photographs, and black candles. The horror narrative was in full swing. In a matter of days, Enriqueta Martí went from total unknown to the perfect scapegoat for a society eager to channel its fears and guilt.
Contemporary historians, however, have debunked much of the story that branded her “the vampire.” Writers like Jordi Corominas in Barcelona 1912: The Enriqueta Martí Case and Elsa Plaza in Debunking the Case of the Vampire of El Raval have examined court documents, medical reports, and police archives, and agree on one key point: the only formal charge was the kidnapping of Teresita. She was never tried for murder, and no solid evidence ever proved she had killed any children.
The remains found in her home turned out to be mostly animal bones or old human remains, possibly from a nearby cemetery. The infamous notebook could easily have been a product of superstition or mental illness. And the claims of an elite-linked child prostitution network were never seriously investigated. Sensationalist newspapers, on the other hand, eagerly filled the blanks with morbid imagination.
The case of Enriqueta Martí reveals not just how the media worked back then, but also the classism and misogyny of a society that found it easier to see a poor, sick, and isolated woman as the embodiment of evil. In a Barcelona roiled by workers’ strikes, extreme poverty, political scandals, and a bourgeoisie increasingly terrified by the “red threat,” the figure of the “vampire” was a convenient outlet for collective guilt and distraction.
She died in the Reina Amàlia prison in May 1913, supposedly lynched by fellow inmates, although some accounts suggest she may have died of uterine cancer. There was no trial, no verdict. What remained was the legend.
Over time, the figure of Enriqueta Martí has become an icon of Barcelona’s popular culture. She has inspired graphic novels, such as La vampira de Barcelona (Norma Editorial), documentaries, plays, TV series, and films. One of the most notable is La vampira de Barcelona (2020), directed by Lluís Danés, which offers a critical and stylized take on the case, portraying Enriqueta more as a victim than a villain.
At the same time, the myth has served as a pretext to label El Raval as a cursed, dark, and dangerous neighborhood. This view, inherited from the yellow journalism of the early 20th century, has stigmatized a historically working-class, diverse, and contradictory part of Barcelona, one also rich in popular culture and resistance.
Enriqueta Martí was probably a deeply troubled woman, a victim of poverty and her own demons. But she was not a serial killer or a cannibal witch. The “vampire of El Raval” was a collective invention, fed by sensationalism, bourgeois morality, institutional classism, and a city afraid of its own reflection.
By rescuing this story from myth and bringing it back into the realm of facts, we’re not just doing justice to Enriqueta as a person, we’re also reclaiming a forgotten part of Barcelona’s history: the history of poor women, the defeated, and those who were burdened with the sins of others.
