{"id":7118,"date":"2026-04-30T09:53:03","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T09:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/?p=7118"},"modified":"2026-04-30T10:29:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T10:29:21","slug":"seafarers-carmen-perez-guerri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/seafarers-carmen-perez-guerri\/","title":{"rendered":"Carmen Perez Guerri"},"content":{"rendered":"

Little is known about Carmen P\u00e9rez G\u00fcerri, but we know enough that we can rightfully say that she deserves the following lines. Her name, unknown to the vast majority, is part of the history of sport in Catalonia. Considering she was a Spanish champion in motorboating, i.e. motorboat racing, only a few press clippings and the occasional fan of her sport are all that remains about her.<\/p>\n

Carmen P\u00e9rez G\u00fcerri’s beginnings in motorboating<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Miquel Mallafr\u00e9, president of the Catalan Motorboating Federation since 2009 and author of the book Catalan Motorboating Federation: 1968-2018. History of the Federation<\/em><\/a>, had the opportunity to speak with her when he was documenting his book, in the early 2000s at the retirement home where she lived.<\/p>\n

Mallafr\u00e9 learned that P\u00e9rez G\u00fcerri got into the world of motorboating through the influence of her brother, Eduardo P\u00e9rez, who also competed in the same discipline. Her husband, Tom\u00e1s Hidalgo Torroella, also practiced motorboating: the couple occasionally competed together. All three were part of the Vilanova i la Geltr\u00fa Yacht Club.<\/p>\n

Not much more is known about her personal life: married and childless, the couple ran a pharmacy located on Las Ramblas in Barcelona. They were comfortable financially speaking, although it was not thanks to the sports titles they had accumulated. At that time, there were no financial rewards for winning motorboat championships, but you had to have sufficient financial support to be able to keep up with the pace of the races: purchasing
\nthe boat, fixing possible malfunctions and traveling to competition sites required a certain amount of financial solvency.<\/p>\n

Motorboating in Catalonia<\/strong><\/h4>\n

As Xavier Sol\u00e0 Barcel\u00f3 explains in the article “The motorboat industry in Barcelona in the nineteen sixties<\/a>“, in the magazine Drassana<\/em>, recreational motorboating in Catalonia started in the early 1900s. In fact, the first evidence of a motorboat race being held dates back to 1904 in the Port of Barcelona, \u200b\u200balthough most Catalan sailing clubs were not created until the 1910-1920s, he points out.<\/p>\n

The appearance of these clubs would spur the sport of motorboating which served to entertain the club members. In those early days, both sailing and motorboats participated in the regattas, but without any regulation by any federation, since the Spanish Motorboating Federation would not emerge until 1965, followed by the Catalan Motorboating Federation in 1968. Sol\u00e0 notes that from the 1920s the sport became more professional and more regulated, and it was then that some Catalan captains left Catalonia and also Spain to participate in international championships.<\/p>\n

In the second half of the 1950s, regattas became widespread, and local yacht clubs began to form their own teams. In the following decade, during the 1960s, the races were better organised, the hulls used were designed exclusively for competition, and the different categories were outlined, which varied depending on the engine displacements and the types of hulls used. According to Sol\u00e0, these were the golden years of motorboating in Catalonia.<\/p>\n

Although this is when motorboat competitions as we understand them today began to take shape, some differences separate the past from today: motorboating comes in a wider variety today \u2014apart from motorboat competitions, there are also jet ski races\u2014, safety measures are stricter and boats can reach higher speeds. If motorboating enjoyed greater visibility at that time, it was also due to the fact that competitions were held inside ports and it was thus more common for people to watch them. Miquel Mallafr\u00e9 explained in an article in Espais<\/em> magazine entitled “Ports and motorboat competitions” that the lack of large navigable lakes and rivers in Catalonia\u2014unlike in countries around us\u2014 means that most motorboat competitions are held inside and around ports.” Mallafr\u00e9 adds that the ports offer visibility, an additional bonus for motorboat races, since the docks become a privileged space where fans could watch the races.<\/p>\n

Her exploits<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Within this timeline, Carmen P\u00e9rez’s exploits in motorboating competitions took place in the early 1970s. Some press clippings from the time show that the name of the Barcelona native \u2014as well as the names of her husband and brother\u2014 was rarely excluded from the podium.<\/p>\n

In 1970 P\u00e9rez was the runner-up in the Spanish Motorboating Championship, which was held with races in Malaga, La Manga del Mar Menor and Sant Carles de la R\u00e0pita.
\nThe same year, she earned further plaudits by finishing seventh in the XXII Centomiglia international regatta on Lake Como in Italy. The pages of La Vanguardia<\/em> on 11 October of that year followed the competition and the Catalan representatives. Under the title “Positive Spanish performances in international competitions on Lake Como”, the media mentions our star athlete in the text: “Mrs de Hidalgo [the married name of Carmen P\u00e9rez], A. Platero, J. Malberti, J. Diamant, JA Orbea and M. Rosell\u00f3 achieved excellent classifications”. Furthermore, the image that accompanies this short chronicle is precisely a portrait of Carmen P\u00e9rez, with a caption that confirms it: “A spectacular turn in which the outboard motor vessel crewed by Mrs Carmen P. de Hidalgo, from the Villanueva Yacht Club, appears”.<\/p>\n

The clipping also notes that, of the seventeen participants representing Spain, only three of them were women, competing in the outboard motor vessel category. La Vanguardia<\/em> highlights P\u00e9rez’s good performance, though not without a hint of condescension: “The Spanish representation that traveled to Italy has managed to showcase the merits of our motorboating athletes, including one woman, Mrs de Hidalgo, whose performances did not detract from those of her compatriots and many of the qualified foreign participants.” The journalist Antonio Moragues also wrote a chronicle of the competition in the newspaper Mundo Deportivo<\/em>, in which he emphasised that “one notable feat in this race is the performance of Carmen P\u00e9rez de Hidalgo \u2014only one other woman competed in the race with her\u2014 who finished with a very honorable seventh place”.<\/p>\n

The following year, in 1971, Carmen P\u00e9rez won the Spanish Championship in the ET category, coming first in the Ceuta and A Coru\u00f1a circuits. In fact, the NO-DO (News and Documentaries) published by the Franco regime on 16 August 1971 broadcast the National Motorboat Championship in A Coru\u00f1a, in which Francisco Franco himself was present among the spectators. As in the previous championships, La Vanguardia<\/em> also featured this competition on its pages, highlighting the name of Carmen P\u00e9rez as the undisputed winner of that race.<\/p>\n

A year later, in 1972, P\u00e9rez also reached the podium, this time together with her husband, Tom\u00e1s Hidalgo. Together they won the Spanish Offshore Championship \u2014open sea races\u2014, in which they participated in regattas in Vilanova, Palam\u00f3s, Mallorca and Tenerife. Finally, in the same year, from 15 to 17 September, the Spanish Single Regatta Championship was held in the San Juan reservoir in Madrid. Although Carmen P\u00e9rez came first in the ET class, she was not awarded the title due to a lack of participants.<\/p>\n

A forgotten legacy<\/strong><\/h4>\n

A priori, the name of Carmen P\u00e9rez G\u00fcerri seemed destined to fall into oblivion: a woman in an essentially male sport, she practiced a little-recognised discipline and she did so for more than five decades. All in all, this combination seemed perfect to erase her from the collective memory. As I mentioned at the beginning, we know little about this athlete, but it is clear that we know enough for her to grace these pages.<\/p>\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n

\"Illustration
Illustration of Carmen P\u00e9rez G\u00fcerri. Artist: Alicia Caboblanco.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catalan motorboating champion<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[192],"class_list":["post-7118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sea-people","tag-192"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7118"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7841,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7118\/revisions\/7841"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistaargo.mmb.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}