The masia, the traditional Catalan farmhouse, lies at the heart of the countryside. Old ancestral houses can resemble small castles, inhabited by heads of families who once ruled their own worlds. They were seats of lineages stretching back for centuries, surrounded by larger communities governed firmly by masters and mistresses. There were also tenant farmhouses, where humbler families contributed their experiences to oral tradition, and poor country houses whose songs, tales and real-life anecdotes were gradually transformed into legend by word of mouth.

As centres of territorial organisation and inherited property, the rural world of Catalonia and its folklore cannot be understood without the masia and the domestic spirits that animate it, among them one of the most important figures in European folk belief: the household goblin. Every piece of this almost feudal microcosm carries stories and secrets, from its archetypal characters and inherited building traditions to the objects and spaces that gave it form. To today’s hyper-technological urban society, many of these things have become strangely unfamiliar, almost mythical: the threshing floor, the hearth, the haystack or the stone basin where clothes were once washed with ash.