Can Forn

The Can Forn grocery shop was opened in 1958 by Antoni Marí Escandell, Toni Forn, who came from a family traditionally linked to the sea and fishing. In fact, he had also been president of the fishermen’s granary and continued to be active as a fisherman.

At Can Forn they sold articles typical of a grocery shop. At that time, Sant Francesc Xavier needed a business that offered basic products such as almonds, wheat, carobs, charcoal, eggs, etc., and they were also pioneers in the sale of oil cookers, which were a boom on an island where until then people cooked with wood or charcoal. They also sold chickens, snails and other products that they sent to Ibiza to sell.

Antoni Marí Escandell kept the supervision of the business and looked after the public relations, while the actual ownership soon fell to his son Antoni Marí Tur, who had also been fishing for some years. He, together with his siblings Pep and Carmen Forn, were the ones who attended to the customers.

Nowadays Pep Forn, although he is retired, continues to visit the shop, which is now run by his nephew Vicent Colomar Marí, Carmen’s son. As a curiosity, he comments that in those early years many families were able to buy on credit, they would write it down in a notebook and when they received their wages in the fields or the salt mines, they would go to the shop to pay.

Among its customers were the first hippies who came to the island in the early sixties of last century, who contributed to the development of the establishment and improved the economy of Formentera when residents had almost nothing.

The shop has been in different locations, all of them very close to the current premises in Pla del Rei Street. He started in a building he owned, small and with only one floor. Later, it moved to a new building, with a first floor for the family’s home, until it was finally located in the current space, attached to the previous one.

Throughout its existence, Can Forn has survived and has established itself as an emblematic reference of small business on the island of Formentera, always under the direction of the same family Marí Forn, keeping alive the spirit of small grocery shop that characterizes it since its inception. In fact, in 2019 Can Forn received the Sant Jaume prize awarded by the Consell Insular de Formentera.