Edesa 🇪🇸

Edesa is the brand of Fabricación de Electrodomésticos, S.A. (Fabrelec), the Basauri factory founded in 1941 that was for decades, together with Frimotor, one of the two Basque poles of the white goods sector. Its official history talks about refrigerators, washing machines, stoves and water heaters; air conditioning does not appear in it, and yet a technician with twenty years of experience cited it in a forum in 2009 among the brands “that today are also dead” that he had installed —National, Edesa, Mepamsa, President, Philco, Electrolux and Westinghouse—, adding that “several of these brands were manufactured in Spain”. It is the only direct data we have of air conditioners with the Edesa brand, and we record it for what it is: the memory of an installer.

The context makes it plausible. Fabrelec had a relationship with Westinghouse since the 60s: the company's commercial envelopes bore the stamp “Fabrelec Edesa Westinghouse,” and in Basauri thermoses were manufactured with the White‑Westinghouse brand. When Frimotor, the Basque licensee of Westinghouse that had been making air conditioners since 1955, disappeared after the 1967 collapse, the technology and the license could have passed to neighboring Basauri; it is a hypothesis, not a documented fact. In 1989 Fagor bought Edesa‑Fabrelec, and in 2000, together with its Rotártica factory, the Fagor and Gas Natural joint venture for gas‑absorption equipment was created, bringing air conditioning back to Basauri by another route. The plant closed with Fagor’s bankruptcy in 2013‑2014.

If someone preserves an Edesa air‑conditioning unit, with its nameplate, it would solve one of the clearest gaps in the history of the Basque white‑goods line.

The central piece of information is the testimony of user ELEUTERIO on elaireacondicionado.com (September 22, 2009): “I have taken apart many of the brands you mention, Crolls, Carrier, Fedders, to assemble other brands that today are also dead such as National, Edesa, Mepamsa, President, Philco, Electrolux and Westinghouse. Several of these brands were manufactured in Spain.” The Fabrelec‑Westinghouse link appears on an envelope circulated with mechanical franking “Fabrelec Edesa Westinghouse” that is sold on todocoleccion and in the Deia chronicle about the 75 years of the factory (White‑Westinghouse boilers). The Fabrelec chronology (1941, Fagor 1989, Rotártica 2000) comes from those same sources and from Wikipedia. We have not found any advertisements or catalogs for Edesa air conditioners; the President brand, cited in the same testimony, could not be corroborated with any other source and therefore has no dedicated entry.

The testimony has added value: the technician distinguishes between the brands he found installed when he started (Crolls, Carrier, Fedders) and those he himself installed later, among them Edesa, which places the Edesa air conditioners in the second half of the ’70s and the ’80s, the period when the major Basque and Navarrese white‑goods lines (Edesa, Mepamsa, Fagor) tried to enter domestic climate control from the appliance store. That the same thread cites Westinghouse and Edesa as separate brands, and at the same time states that “several were manufactured in Spain,” leaves open the possibility that they were the same Basauri device with two plates.

History machine-translated from Spanish. Can you improve it? Write to us.