Fagor 🇪🇸

Fagor is the cooperative. In October 1956 five young people from Mondragón, students of the professional school of priest José María Arizmendiarrieta, bought the Otalora workshop in Vitoria, which had authorization to manufacture household appliances, moved it to a pavilion in the San Andrés neighborhood and named it Ulgor with the initials of their surnames. In 1959 they turned it into a cooperative and registered the brand Fagor —they wanted “Tagor”, but it was already taken—, the seed of what would become Fagor Electrodomésticos and the entire Mondragón Corporation. In 1986, at thirty years old, it was the European manufacturer with the widest range of home products.

Air conditioning was never the heart of Fagor, but it was a real chapter of its catalogue. The cooperative was for decades the reference manufacturer of boilers, heaters and water heaters in the country, and in 2000 it founded Rotártica, in Basauri together with Edesa, for a then unusual product: absorption machines that made cold with natural gas and solar energy. In the first decade of the century, with the real‑estate bubble driving demand, Fagor incorporated wall‑mounted splits, multisplits, cassettes and ducted units with DC Inverter technology, ionizer and activated carbon filters, which appear in its 2010 and 2011 catalogues. They were equipment manufactured by third parties and marketed under the brand, as the whole European white‑goods line did, although Fagor has never publicly detailed the origin.

On October 17, 2013, Fagor Electrodomésticos filed for creditor protection with a debt of 1,000 million euros, the largest bankruptcy of a cooperative in Spain. On July 28, 2014, the San Sebastián court awarded the productive assets to Cata, of the Catalan CNA group, which reopened the Mondragón plant that October. In 2019, the Polish company Amica obtained exclusive use of the brand for the domestic white goods line.

Air conditioning was left out of that distribution, and here comes the twist: in November 2024 the Mondragón Corporation, which retains ownership of the brand, closed an agreement with Sareteknika —the group's technical service cooperative— to sell boilers, water heaters, water tanks, air conditioning and aerothermal systems again under the Fagor name. In other words, Fagor air returns home, even if only as a brand on another company's product. For the collector, classic Fagor units are the white splits from the 2000s, discreet, unpretentious and with a plate that promises Mondragón quality.

Pending verification

Who manufactured (OEM) the Fagor splits of the 2000s and in which exact year they entered the catalogue; the details of the ranges prior to 2010.

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