Who was the first person to register a car in Granada?

It was the first car to be registered in the province and who could have predicted then that just over a century later, the excessive number of vehicles on the roads would lead to recurring meetings, studies, projects, the installation of monitoring devices and a perpetual black cloud hanging over the city to combat the pollution caused by so many cars.

Between 1815 and 1899, a great many four-wheeled inventions came into being, powered by various types of combustion engines. In any case, it was not until the dawn of the 20th century that cars began to be mass-produced.

It was then that a registration system became necessary to bring order to this surge that would transform both transport and urban planning in cities. This procedure, for which physical documents from the period exist, allows us to establish a definitive record: to determine which was the first vehicle to be registered in Granada.

The Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT) has made a document entitled available on its official website 'First vehicles registered in Spain' , which lists, by province, the first car registered in each region. According to the DGT, 268 vehicles were registered between 1901 and 1905. The change was so radical that, in just 30 years, the number of registrations rose to over 150,000 between 1926 and 1930 alone.

However, at the start of the 20th century it was not all that common to see a car on the streets and the only people who could afford them were members of high society at the time. Not surprisingly, the first car registered in Granada – a Peugeot registered on 23 June 1904 – belonged to Nicolás García Ruiz, a well-known businessman.

By 1905 there were three cars registered in Granada province and by 1906 there were seven. Compared with other provinces it was a gradual increase, but by 1913, there were 116 registered cars and by 1924 the number had reached one thousand.

Nicolás García Ruiz was the businessman behind the construction of the Grand Hotel París, situated at number 3 Gran Vía. A building which, from the early 20th century, became one of the city’s most emblematic structures of its time and which still stands in Granada today. It was formally opened on 10 January 1908, following more than 2.5 years of construction.

It served as a hotel until 1929. Two years later, in 1931, the ground floor reopened as a shop under the name ‘Almacenes París’. Today, the iconic building is just one of the many structures lining Granada’s Gran Vía, one of the city’s streets with the highest concentration of historic buildings.