“When do you open?” » is the most repeated phrase at number 22 Desengaño Street, a small street parallel to Gran Vía where several traditional businesses still survive. The question is asked by many passers-by who pass by Riesgo, the oldest business of all, opened in 1866 and which closed unexpectedly during the summer, amid many questions.
But this week, there is light inside, so many curious people knock on the door, still closed, to chat with those inside. “Do you have a product to kill termites?” » asks a man, “paraffin oil” then says a cosmetologist.
“We walk around like this all day, it’s been something incredible,” explains Hugo Riesgo from the inside, while he works on cleaning, organizing, arranging… to reopen at faster the company that his great-grandfather created almost a century ago. Also at his side is his cousin Ramón, who took it upon himself to restart the business with a third cousin (Álvaro), an uncle (Santiago) and a lawyer close to the family, Carlos.
Riesgo closed its doors last July without giving any explanation and with a sign claiming that it had been closed “due to inventory” and that all its activities had subsequently been transferred to online commerce. In reality, the company that had run the business for six years – Southcore Chemicals & Raw Materials – was not paying rent on the premises and had left huge debts to its suppliers and its own workers. It was later learned that the managers were David Domenech and Alexandra Camacho, who are currently settling their criminal responsibilities in court in a case in Asturias linked to this but with many more employees involved, that of Alo Ibérica, the former Alcoa.
In 2018, part of the large Riesgo family (with 57 owners) decided to sell most of the company to this business group. “They weren’t interested in the store, they were interested in something else…” explains Ramón, who had been working in the family business for two decades when the new investors arrived. “The neighborhood noticed that it wasn’t the same,” he remembers of the deterioration of his business and the prestige that the Riesgo name has always had in the city.
Fortunately, a bold move on the part of the descendants saved the historic premises on Calle Desengaño: shortly before the sale of the business, the premises were acquired by a former customer of the pharmacy, whom she visited regularly since her childhood. She was the owner who fired the previous managers and made the historic store available to cousins who now want to reopen the business.
“It was a very hard blow for the family,” Hugo and Ramón say today about the use of their name by Southcore, which later created a business conglomerate called Grupo Industrial Riesgo. Questioned by this newspaper, the managers of this company refused in July to comment on this closure.
A company created with Alsa shares
Both Hugo and Ramón belong to the fourth generation of the family. They want to resolve the mistakes of the past and relaunch a business that became very successful thanks to their founding great-grandfather, Manuel Riesgo, an Asturian who came to Madrid to treat tuberculosis that he could not fight in the region’s humid climate. . north of the peninsula.
Once in the capital, Manuel sold the shares of a bus company that he had founded with other partners, called Automóviles Luarca SA (currently Alsa) and took over the transmission of a herbalist’s shop opened since 1866 in the Desengaño Street. In 1926 he founded the company in his name and, while continuing to sell botany, he began to introduce chemicals, which began to be in high demand. This was the beginning of a small empire that included, among other properties, a perfumery on Gran Vía Street, warehouses in Legazpi and Villaverde. And with more than a hundred employees.
It was Manuel Riesgo who renovated the entire store and ordered his characteristic drawers, almost 500, which were made one by one, with ceramic plates of all kinds of products (the one that usually attracts the most attention is the spermaceti) and facades painted by an artist who used a secret formula to simulate wood grain. He also placed a painting of his town, Luarca, above a door. Years later, in 1955, he placed a diploma right in front of the store that certified his store as the best drugstore in Madrid and that it would remain there until reopening.
The five partners are working hard to get everything up and running. “Getting started is difficult,” Hugo admits, because the premises had been devastated by the previous tenants. Today, they strive to recapture the glory of their underground warehouses, which stretch beneath Desengaño Street and once housed up to 13,000 chemical SKUs. “On the one hand you see everything that needs to be done, but then you go out and tell people you can’t wait to come back… that’s the beautiful thing and what you’re passionate about,” adds the man. ‘business. .
“We started from scratch, but we are going to try to recover all the essence, little by little”, they continue to say, to recover a loyal and, in some cases, very famous clientele: the painter Antonio López has took pigments for his paintings, as well as specialists from the artistic departments and actors passionate about drawing: “José Luis López Vázquez was a regular customer,” they remember. Neighboring Alaska also bought here, as did Hormiguero’s production team, which acquired the chemical components for his famous experiments.
The new partners also add new features to their usual activity, such as organizing soap making workshops, homemade cosmetics, etc. and offering everything their customers are looking for. Right now they have a notebook on the door so people can write down what they need. In it, among the requests for insecticides against bedbugs and essential oils, thanks for their feedback and words of encouragement are mixed.
The idea is to have everything ready by the end of October, organize a small opening party and operate as usual from November. As they tell it, another prospective customer looks through the door and asks for mint oil to flavor the floors. They take note of it and promise to try to have it for the return trip. “Soon to open, because the area has been greatly deformed,” he wishes them as he says goodbye.
