Enriqueta Martí was arrested in Barcelona on February 27, 1912, after a five-year-old girl who had been missing for more than two weeks was found alive in her keeping in the Raval district. Within days the city's newspapers had made her the "vampira del Raval," the vampire of the Raval, a woman said to have abducted and killed children and sold remedies made from their bodies to rich clients. She died in the Reina Amalia women's prison in May 1913 without being tried. More than a century later, the writers and historians who went back to the newspapers and court files of 1912 concluded that the murders had never been shown, and that the case said more about Barcelona than about her.
The abduction of the girl is the one crime that the record supports. Everything else, from the number of children she was said to have killed to the way she was said to have died, has been disputed, and much of it has been rejected.
The details of her early life vary between accounts. 3Cat, the Catalan public broadcaster, gives her birth as February 2, 1868, in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, a town just outside Barcelona. Nació Digital gives the same town but the year 1871, and betevé, the Barcelona city broadcaster, gives Sant Pere de Ribes in 1871 and describes her as the daughter of a master builder. Barcelona Metropolitan observes that the sources conflict over the year. Muy Interesante, which gives her full name as Enriqueta Martí Ripollés, reports that she was 45 when she died.
She moved to Barcelona young; betevé puts her arrival at 15 or 16 and says little is documented about those years, which became a field for rumor. 3Cat and Nació Digital report that she worked first as a nanny and later in prostitution. She married a painter; Barcelona Metropolitan, citing his own account, reports that the couple separated and reconciled about six times and had been apart for five years by 1912. 3Cat describes the marriage as troubled both by money and by feeling.
The household lived on very little. Nació Digital reports that the couple made a living from selling antiques, from charity, and from a herbalist's shop where she worked as a healer. Muy Interesante describes her as living by begging and by selling objects recovered from rubbish, often depending on public charity for food, and caring for her sick father, who was in hospital at the time of her arrest. She had lost a son as a baby; Muy Interesante gives his age as ten months, and elDiario.es and 3Cat report that he died of malnutrition.
The later legend gave her a double life: a beggar by day at the doors of convents and parishes, and by night a figure in the casinos and theaters of the wealthy. 3Cat and Nació Digital repeat versions of that story, and it fed the idea that she had powerful clients. The historians who studied her life describe a poor woman, probably unwell, scraping a living at the margins of the city.
Several accounts describe an arrest in 1909, the year of the Tragic Week, when Barcelona was shaken by a week of rioting and repression. Nació Digital and Barcelona Metropolitan report that police arrested her that year over accusations of running a brothel, and that the case went no further. Nació Digital says someone with influence had the accusation removed; Barcelona Metropolitan says her police file was "lost" and that she was released without charge, while rumor credited a powerful client. Neither outlet identifies who was involved.
By early 1912, rumors that children were being taken from the streets of Barcelona were widespread. 3Cat reports that some people suspected wealthy figures were behind the disappearances. The civil governor, Manuel Portela Valladares, dismissed the stories; Nació Digital quotes him as saying the rumor was completely false. Barcelona Metropolitan reports that he had played down the kidnapping rumors before February 1912, and that the failure of the authorities to find the missing girl added to public anger.
The girl, who was five, disappeared on February 10, 1912, according to Muy Interesante. Nació Digital reports that she was separated from her mother for only a few seconds. 3Cat describes about two weeks of anxiety in the city while the press followed the search, and later 3Cat pieces on the case describe her as the daughter of a well-off family.
The break came from the neighborhood. 3Cat reports that a neighbor saw a girl she did not recognize at Martí's window and passed word to a mattress maker, who told a municipal guard, who in turn told a police brigadier named Ribot. Muy Interesante and Barcelona Metropolitan report that the police used a complaint about hens kept in the flat as the formal reason to enter.
On February 27, 1912, police found two girls in her home. One was the missing five-year-old, whose hair had been cut and who, according to Barcelona Metropolitan, at first gave another name. Muy Interesante reports that she was returned to her family in good health. The other, a younger girl, was presented by Martí as her own daughter. 3Cat reports that Martí told police she had found the five-year-old hungry in the street. Nació Digital gives the same explanation: that the girl was lost and had been taken in because she was hungry. Martí was arrested.
What the second girl was to Martí became one of the questions of the case. Barcelona Metropolitan reports that Martí first called her a daughter, which her estranged husband disputed, and later said she had taken the baby from her sister-in-law at birth. Elsa Plaza, cited by Barcelona Metropolitan, concluded that the girl was most likely Martí's niece, the daughter of her husband's sister, and 3Cat and Muy Interesante also describe her as a niece. elDiario.es reports that the girl was later placed in an orphanage.
The search of her home and of places where she had lived before produced the story that made her name. According to Muy Interesante, police concluded from what they seized that she had made healing ointments and potions from the remains of children. 3Cat reports that the press described bones and a list of names of upper-class people. Catalan News, summarizing the accusations, reports that police claimed to have uncovered a long history of trafficking and murder linked to the disappearances of dozens of children in the Raval.
The accounts of what she said under questioning differ. Barcelona Metropolitan reports that she admitted using human remains in her preparations but said they came from people already dead, and that she denied murder. Muy Interesante reports that she never gave a statement. Barcelona Metropolitan also reports that the girl found with her spoke of a boy who had been killed, and that Martí denied knowing anything about him. No boy was identified in any of the reporting, and no body of a child was produced.
The press of 1912 took up every claim. elDiario.es reports that Barcelona papers gave the case up to four pages a day and that some Madrid papers sent leading writers to cover it. The satirical weeklies drew her too: Barcelona Metropolitan reproduces caricatures from L'Esquella de la Torratxa of March 8, 1912, and La Campana de Gràcia of March 9, 1912. She became the vampire of the Raval and the vampire of Barcelona. 3Cat sums up the result: press and gossip turned her into someone accused of abducting children, exploiting them and killing them for her potions.
The list of names, which had been read as a roster of rich clients, was explained differently. 3Cat reports that the names were those of people who regularly gave her alms, and elDiario.es describes them as addresses of houses where a beggar could ask for charity.
The material seized in 1912 did not bear out the accusations. elDiario.es reports that forensic experts later found the bones to be animal, not human, and that the newspapers paid little attention to the finding, with some blaming the doctors for misleading them. Barcelona Metropolitan reports that the human material was later found to belong to one unknown person in their mid-twenties, and Muy Interesante gives the same age. betevé reports that the bones first thought to be human were later identified as animal remains. Plaza, in the account given by Muy Interesante, suggests that Martí probably collected the human material from a cemetery, at a time when local superstition gave such objects value as charms. Nació Digital also describes the bones as those of adults, used in home remedies she regarded as having special power.
The blood had a simpler explanation. betevé, Muy Interesante and the historian Patricia Melgar's review of Plaza's book all attribute the stains to bleeding caused by the uterine cancer from which Martí was suffering, the illness that killed her. Muy Interesante reports that no one proved the ointments contained human remains.
Nació Digital, summarizing the evidence, says nothing solid showed that she was a murderer. 3Cat, reporting on the 2020 film about her, states that only the abduction of the girl was proven. The director of that film, Lluís Danés, told Time Out Barcelona in 2019 that this was the only thing that could be shown.
The newspapers dropped the story almost as quickly as they had built it. elDiario.es reports that coverage stopped abruptly when Holy Week and the sinking of the Titanic took over the front pages, and that no paper apologized or went back over what it had printed. Danés, quoted by 3Cat, also links the end of the coverage to the Titanic.
Researchers have asked why the case grew so large. 3Cat reports that in the same week as her arrest a real case of child exploitation in the Raval came to light, one in which police complicity was alleged, and that the vampire story served to explain away the disappearance of children in the district, many of whom, the broadcaster reports, were in fact taken to work in factories in France or exploited by the rich. Barcelona Metropolitan reports the same discovery days after her arrest and says that the origins of the children involved were not established.
Patricia Melgar's review records that Plaza found a court register for 1912 listing 236 cases of ill-treatment, abduction and disappearance of minors, and that Plaza reads the Martí case as a smokescreen that drew attention away from those crimes, from the trafficking of children for factory work in France and from the involvement of police officers. The review also records Plaza's account of irregularities in the police handling of the case, including a robbery at Martí's home and the later appearance of new evidence.
Martí was held in the Reina Amalia women's prison in Barcelona, awaiting trial. Barcelona Metropolitan reports that she attempted suicide there. She did not come to trial on the 1912 accusations; betevé reports that she died in the prison before any trial for the alleged killings of children had been held.
She died on May 12, 1913, according to Muy Interesante. betevé, 3Cat and Nació Digital give uterine cancer as the cause, and Barcelona Metropolitan reports that her death certificate lists it. Muy Interesante gives the official version as natural causes after a long illness. Time Out Barcelona, reporting on the planned film in 2019, also states that she died of cancer in the prison, which was demolished in 1936.
A different story outlived her. Newspapers and later retellings said that other prisoners beat her to death in the prison yard, and some versions add that her rich clients paid for her silence. elDiario.es, in its 2015 report on Corominas's book, still repeats that fellow inmates lynched her, while noting that the press never settled whether she died from a beating or from cancer. Melgar's review records Plaza's conclusion that the lynching never happened and that she died of illness, and 3Cat suggests the whole account of a violent death was probably false. betevé reports that she was buried in a common grave on Montjuïc, and that the popular version of her death still circulates alongside stories of her ghost.
Two researchers did most to take the legend apart, each publishing a book in 2014.
Jordi Corominas, a Barcelona journalist and writer born in 1979, had at first presented the vampire story as true in earlier work on famous crimes. elDiario.es reports that he began to doubt it around 2010 and went back to the newspaper archives, finding that the myth rested on the first sensational reports and that no one had followed the later course of the case. His book, Barcelona 1912. El caso Enriqueta Martí, was published by Sílex. elDiario.es describes it as a portrait of the city in 1912 as much as of Martí: the last years of Modernisme, a rising middle class, and alongside them poverty, prostitution, anarchism and begging. Corominas argued that the city seemed to want a killer of its own, a local Jack the Ripper, when its real crimes of the period turned on money and love. betevé quotes him as saying that her story has been distorted. Muy Interesante reports his view that the case may have been used to draw attention away from scandals involving wealthy men. For Corominas, two questions stayed open: why Martí took the girl, and what became of the other people in the story.
Elsa Plaza's Desmontando el caso de la vampira del Raval. Misoginia y clasismo en la Barcelona modernista was published by Icaria. Melgar's review, in HSE: Social and Education History in 2015, describes it as a reconstruction from press reports, court records, letters and registers, which argues that the official story was false and explains how it came to be believed. Plaza places Martí in a long tradition of accusations against poor women who worked with herbs, and reads the case through the misogyny and class prejudice of the time. Barcelona Metropolitan quotes her central question: how a single abduction could lead to accusations of serial crimes without a single body being found.
Others have reached similar views. The anthropologist Anna Madrid Egea, co-author of Yo me confieso bruja, told betevé that Martí was a scapegoat, like many women who made ointments at a time when healing was treated as the preserve of male doctors. 3Cat's profile of Martí presents her as a poor and disturbed woman grieving her son, who may have taken the girl to fill that loss, and who would probably receive psychiatric care today. betevé reports a related explanation: that she took the girl as a companion for the younger child in her care, knowing that she herself was dying of cancer.
The record, as reported by the historians and broadcasters who have examined the case, supports the following. A five-year-old girl went missing in Barcelona on February 10, 1912, and was found alive in Enriqueta Martí's keeping on February 27, 1912. Martí was arrested and held for trial. A second, younger girl in her care was most likely her niece. The material seized was mostly animal bone, with human material from one adult, and the blood is explained by her illness. She died in prison of cancer on May 12, 1913, and was buried in a common grave on Montjuïc.
The legend, as printed in 1912 and repeated for a century, adds a long list of murdered children, potions made from their bodies, a ledger of rich clients, a confession, and a death at the hands of other prisoners. None of those claims was proved in court, and the researchers who checked them found that most rested on the first days of press coverage. The number of children she was said to have killed was not established, and no child victim was ever identified.
Accounts differ on her birth year and birthplace: 1868 in Sant Feliu de Llobregat (3Cat), 1871 in Sant Feliu de Llobregat (Nació Digital) and 1871 in Sant Pere de Ribes (betevé).
Whether she ever stood trial in any case is disputed. Several outlets state that she was never tried. Melgar's 2015 review of Plaza's book states that she was tried and convicted in one older, separate case, on other charges, and sentenced to one year and eight months in prison, and that no evidence ever charged her with murder.
Her own words under questioning are reported in opposite ways: as a partial admission about using human remains in remedies, with a denial of murder (Barcelona Metropolitan), and as no statement at all (Muy Interesante).
Her motive for taking the girl is unknown. Researchers have suggested grief for her son, an obsession with motherhood, mental illness, or a wish to give the younger girl in her care a companion while she was dying.
The other accusations made against her in the 1912 press, beyond abduction and murder, were not proved either, and the researchers who studied the case regard them as part of the legend.
The story moved into fiction. The novelist Marc Pastor based a crime novel on her, published in Spanish as La mala mujer; Time Out Barcelona reports that it won the Crims de Tinta prize and ran to many editions in Catalan and Spanish.
The film La vampira de Barcelona, directed by Lluís Danés and starring Nora Navas as Martí, was produced by Brutal Media and Filmax with TV3 and opened in cinemas on December 4, 2020, according to 3Cat. It won the audience award at the 53rd Sitges festival, five Gaudí awards and a special-effects prize at Grimmfest in Manchester in 2021. Time Out Barcelona reported in 2019 that the project had been in development for 11 years. Danés told 3Cat that the case was one of the first pieces of fake news in history and that Martí was a scapegoat: poor, a former prostitute and ill, but not a murderer. Navas described the woman she played as poor and solitary, someone who worked with herbs. Danés told Time Out Barcelona that the film would not excuse her, saying that she was not a balanced woman, while the press and authorities of the time had turned her into a figure of evil to hide the conduct of the city's elites.
The closing line of elDiario.es's 2015 report on Corominas's work put the matter plainly: that is the history; the rest is legend.
1868 or 1871: Born in Sant Feliu de Llobregat (3Cat gives February 2, 1868) or, in betevé's account, in Sant Pere de Ribes in 1871.
1909: Arrested in Barcelona on accusations of running a brothel; released without charge, as reported.
February 10, 1912: A five-year-old girl disappears in Barcelona.
February 27, 1912: Police find the girl alive in Martí's keeping in the Raval, with a younger girl, most likely Martí's niece; Martí is arrested.
March 8 and 9, 1912: The satirical weeklies L'Esquella de la Torratxa and La Campana de Gràcia publish caricatures of her.
1912: Press coverage stops abruptly as Holy Week and the sinking of the Titanic take over the news.
1912 to 1913: Held in the Reina Amalia women's prison awaiting trial.
May 12, 1913: Dies in prison; her death is attributed to uterine cancer. Buried in a common grave on Montjuïc.
1936: The Reina Amalia prison is demolished.
2014: Jordi Corominas publishes Barcelona 1912. El caso Enriqueta Martí; Elsa Plaza publishes Desmontando el caso de la vampira del Raval.
December 4, 2020: The film La vampira de Barcelona opens in cinemas.