La Caixa
Spanish foundation, owner of CriteriaCaixa and its subsidiaries, including CaixaBank
La Caixa Foundation (Catalan: Fundació ”la Caixa”, Spanish: Fundación ”la Caixa”) is a not-for-profit banking foundation based in Spain, with its headquarters in Barcelona since March 2025.
Originally a savings bank (called a caixa in catalan, hence the name), it reorganized in the 2000s and 2010s. Since then, its commercial assets have been managed under its subsidiary CriteriaCaixa, which also has partial ownership of La Caixa's old banking business CaixaBank; those are used to fund La Caixa's Obra Social — social, cultural, scientific, and civic projects for the public good.
History
The foundation commonly dates itself to the 1990 creation of the Caixa d'Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona as a merger of the Caixa d'Estalvis i Mont de Pietat de Barcelona founded in 1844 and commonly known as Caixa de Barcelona, founded in 1844, with the Caixa de Pensions per a la Vellesa i d'Estalvis de Catalunya i Balears, founded in 1904 and commonly known as the Caixa de Pensions and later "La Caixa".
Ancestry
Caixa de Barcelona
At the time of the 1990 merger, the Caixa de Barcelona was the third largest savings bank in Spain.
Caixa de Pensions
The Caixa de Pensions per a la Vellesa (English: Old Age Pension Society) was formed in 1904 in Catalonia by Francesc Moragas, and opened to the public in 1905, expanding to the Balearic Islands in 1915. It merged with the Caixa d’Estalvis del Empordà in 1915, taking on the name "Caixa de Pensions per a la Vellesa i d’Estalvis".
The Obra Social was formally created in 1918 to oversee the Caixa's social work.
By 1930, the Caixa had been reformed 15 times by mergers with other organizations; the first outside of Catalonia was the Caixa Rural per a la Federació Catòlic-Agraria d’Eivissa in 1930.
In 1969, the Caixa de Pensions became the first in Europe to begin real-time computerized tele-processing of transactions, allowing customers to do banking at any branch at will.
“La Caixa” enters the record as spanish foundation, owner of CriteriaCaixa and its subsidiaries, including CaixaBank. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Caixa, Spanish and foundation can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q287753. VIAF identifies the subject as 63145424575286830845. The Library of Congress control number is n94057523. 2 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 1990, 1844 and 1904.
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This entry incorporates text from “La Caixa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.