Pedro Aguilar, the royal carpenter of the antibiotic king

From San Pedro (Marbella), you could see the chimney of the iron foundry in the El Ángel neighbourhood, when there were hardly any traces of steel production left. It was about 35 metres high, and Tobalito El Negro, a resident of El Ingenio, climbed to the top and, armed with a pickaxe, knocked it down. It took him two weeks of hard work.

Isidro Banús, the nephew of the developer of the well-known marina, had commissioned him to do the job, but then refused to pay him, considering the fee excessive.

‘I'll grab you by the legs!’ warned Tobalito, and he got paid for his work.

Pedro Aguilar, who recounts this story, was born in El Ángel when the estate was an agricultural colony. In the 19th century, it had been home to one of the first ironworks in the country, and later, as industrial agricultural land, it was succeeded first by a flour mill, then a sugar mill, and later produced the best oranges.

At the age of five, Pedro was surprised to see the gas-powered cars (the old system used in Spain in the 1940s to make up for the shortage of petrol, which worked by producing combustible gas from wood or coal) shooting out a jet of fire with the door of the wood tank open.

Portal where the church was located. / PERSONAL ARCHIVE

There was a year of terrible drought. The country folk blamed it on the planes from the American base in Rota (Cadiz), which flew overhead causing a great noise, as if the clouds had exploded. The following year it rained cats and dogs, flooding the area around Cortijo Blanco, which had not yet been built. El Ángel had 200 inhabitants, orange trees, olive trees, fig trees and livestock. At the age of 18, I worked doing various jobs in the colony; I got around on mules.

There was a carpenter's workshop and a forge next door. I liked carpentry and started working as an assistant. There were no machines; everything was done by hand. There I met Pepito Banús, the nephew of the developer José Banús, who hired me to work on the construction of houses and doors and to make some furniture. With Banús, I had Saturdays off from noon until Monday, which was a privilege. The new owners sold the Swiss cows, the castrated oxen and the sheep. The construction of the golf courses crushed the orange groves.

With the tourism boom, the agricultural colony was transformed into the golf valley. All tourist destinations wanted to be Monaco, and so did José Banús. He added about a thousand hectares of land with the purchase of several estates between the Verde and Guadaiza rivers. His peculiar Mesopotamia was five times the size of the Monegasque leisure kingdom he set out to recreate. The ambitious project, in addition to the golf courses, included hotels, a casino, a bullring and a marina. He initially named the marina after the project's main estate, El Ángel, but it later took the name of its developer and became the tourist emblem of the municipality.

I never met Don José. I knew he was staying at the hotel and that he would be leaving soon, but I never got to see him. Although Antonio Correa (a former governor of Barcelona) was the head of the El Ángel estate, it was Banús's nephews who were really in charge.

Bastiano Bergese bought La Concepción, the estate where Manuel Agustín Heredia, the driving force behind the steel industry in Málaga, had built the Marbella blast furnaces a century earlier. Bergese owned pharmaceutical laboratories in Italy and Spain. He boasted that at the age of 17 he had picked cotton in Brazil and that he was a chemist and hairdresser.

He had brought penicillin to Spain and was reported for it. (In the 1940s, there was not enough penicillin to supply the population and it was obtained on the black market). He had to pay a fine of 20 million pesetas and was facing prison. Thanks to his influence, he got off scot-free. Francisco Franco wanted to award him the Order of San Fernando for the medicines, but he could not because he was not Spanish.

Bergese had earned the nickname “the king of antibiotics”.

Bastiano Bergese. / PERSONAL ARCHIVE

"I always called him “Sir”. When he took over La Concepción, the whole farmhouse was abandoned. He needed a carpenter, and there I was. The church had been burned down after the foundry disappeared; among the remains of the chapel hung a small sign that read: 1853, and he put it in the administrator's house. The previous owner of the estate had been Antonio Navajas, who bathed in a basin. The property developer José María Azumendi had agreed to buy the estate, where he planned to build the Andalucía la Vieja housing development (Banús's company was Andalucía la Nueva). He removed the other chimney, the one from the La Concepción furnaces, and built a stone arch. He failed to obtain the necessary permits and abandoned the project. While the foundry below (El Ángel) contained only slag and waste, the one above was a marvel; it had a waterwheel, with water from the river.

Bergese brought in new machinery, excavators, and rebuilt the farmhouse. He turned the church into his home. He never left the upper floor of the old chapel, where he had his bedroom and office; downstairs was the living room, all tastefully decorated; Jaime Parladé helped with the decoration. He also built several guest rooms, which no one ever used. There were seven bathrooms in the farmhouse. A swimming pool, which they called the lake, and a very large living room.

Swimming pool at La Concepción estate. / PERSONAL ARCHIVE

He was upset by the motorway construction project because it was going to run in front of his estate. Alfonso de Hohenlohe, who was a good friend of his, came to try to calm him down and convince him that the route wasn't so bad. Once he brought him framed photos of motorways, hung them on the wall and said, 'Don't you think it's fine?

Solo el príncipe Alfonso y yo podíamos pasearnos por la finca día y noche, sin pedir permiso a nadie. Yo me gané su confianza.

Only Prince Alfonso and I could walk around the estate day and night without asking anyone's permission. I earned his trust.

One Sunday, I saw a large man dancing into the dining room, which was about a hundred square metres in size: ‘I've done it, they've diverted the motorway and it doesn't affect me.’ Bergese even had influence with Richard Nixon. He was a close friend of the Marquis of Villaverde, Franco's son-in-law, who used to visit his house.

He had several paintings by the Chilean painter Claudio Bravo, who was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía, and was a friend of Farah Diba, the former empress of Iran, to whom he bequeathed a house in the medina of Marrakesh (Morocco). Bergese's partner was Pilia, Claudio Bravo's sister, and he put a 500-square-metre flat in her name. One of his neighbours was Luis Miguel Dominguín, who had an extraordinary beak; he took Pilia away from him. When Lucía Bosé separated from the bullfighter, Bergese had been with her for a while. She did not get on well with the staff; she looked down on the servants.

‘You people make too much of a big deal out of horns. It doesn't matter to us,’ she would say to me.

She advised me never to go to the casino, that it was ruinous. When Pilia left him, gambling caused him to fall into financial crisis.

His last partner was Gudrun Bjarnadóttir, Miss Iceland and Miss International 1963, with whom he was photographed in a feature in Paris Match magazine.

El Ángel colonial church. / ELISA CEPEDANO ARCHIVE

He commissioned American architect Bob Mosher, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design Villa La Ermita, to the right of the Casablanca residential development, a unique beach villa with a beautiful pine forest. He wanted to build a private harbour there, but his request was denied. Technicians from the port of Los Cristianos in Santa Cruz de Tenerife came and spent four or five days there, but it was not feasible.

‘You know what? You have the worst constitution in the world,’ he said to me at the time.

He had several cars, including Jaguars, and he changed his Rolls Royces every 700 kilometres. He did not like people getting into his car when he was not there. I told him he was the richest man in Europe, but he wouldn't admit it. He invested in land; at the Benahavís crossroads, he owned the Pernet estate, which he bought for 4 million pesetas and sold for 44 million. He bought cheap and sold dear. Once, we were on our way to Ronda and he was lamenting the fact that Rolls Royce shares had plummeted. When we passed Adnan Kashoggi's La Baraka estate, he regretted not having bought it when it belonged to Parladé.

Princess Marie Louise of Prussia, who attended two or three parties given by Bergese at the La Concepción estate, remembers the host as a very cheerful Italian who brought penicillin to Spain.

His gatherings were very famous. He had some paintings by Claudio Bravo, of very beautiful ladies, with shapes of fruit and vegetables (in the style of the painter Giuseppe Arcimbondo, who depicted the human face using flowers or fruit) and a mural at the entrance, of an Arab riding a horse, which was beautiful.

At a party, a German lady took off her shoes and a dog took them away.

‘Take the dogs away, they're the princess's shoes,’ Bergese shouted at her.

‘It's not like she took the gold,’ I said, and everyone laughed, recalls Pedro Aguilar.

He heard everything; there were devices all over the house. The clerk showed me that he had a little device on his desk with a battery inside. That's how he found out that the previous administrator was involved with a cleaner, and he fired them both. He had seven or eight servants and several cars.

‘This is worth more than the house,’ he told me when he showed me the documentation from the La Concepción foundry. He warmly retrieved the papers that were stuck together from the humidity. There was a document that said that a lawyer for a descendant of Heredia used seven horses to get to Madrid. He was going to defend his client, who had gotten involved in a political brawl, and he didn't arrive in time to save his life.

I met an employee at a car wash who met a Swedish couple who wanted to set up a Volvo dealership in Madrid, but the government required that a Spanish person be at the helm. That's how they found Antonio Amil and made him a partner in the dealership. The couple died in an accident, and the car washer took over the business. He wanted to be friends with Bergese, but Bergese didn't want to. He had a very nice villa on the road to Istán; my brother was his gardener.

Antonio Amil, second from the right. / PERSONAL ARCHIVE

I built a changing room next to the swimming pool for Antonio El Bailarín at his house, El Martinete; when they built Puerto Banús, the west wind blew everything away. The last time I saw him was in San Pedro; he was already old, I greeted him and he said, ‘See you in 20 years.’ I also did some odd jobs at Sean Connery's house, but I didn't talk to him. Ricardo Soriano is the person to whom tourism in Marbella owes the most. He set up El Rodeo, the cinema and the rastraculos, those low motorbikes.

Era muy mujeriego; a cada una que veía le decía que le regalaba una finca.

Bergese tenía una hija, que no tenía relación con él; decía que le había salvado la vida con la penicilina. Cuando estaba enfermo, me llamaba desde Suiza a las tres de la mañana para hablar conmigo. Tenía el estómago muy hinchado, sufrió un cáncer y se marchó con 73 años, en nada de tiempo se murió. Me propuso ser jefe de la finca La Concepción, pero no acepté por miedo a las envidias; después me arrepentí.

Ante el cónsul de España en París, en 1990 creó la fundación que lleva su nombre, para luchar contra el cáncer en Marbella. Desembolsó entonces un millón de dólares para su puesta en marcha, y se proponía la prevención del cáncer mediante el desarrollo de programas de detección, así como la información e investigación sobre su conocimiento y control.