Bosch always took great care to project a certain image of his work, with the aim of impressing his partners and clients. As part of this personal publicity campaign, he took up residence in a “little hotel” on the Champs-Élysées and frequented the Opera to cultivate his social standing. All of this greatly appealed to his compatriots who, in the last quarter of the 19th century, saw Ivo Bosch as an influential figure with whom to do business. Broder recalls that this way of acting was very similar to that of José Salamanca some thirty years earlier, during the early days of the railway business in Spain. Although he did not reach the stature of the banker from Málaga—who served as Minister of Finance—Bosch also clearly exerted influence over certain ministers and politicians of the time, as we will see later.

During those early years of success, he was part of a group of small bankers who joined or collaborated with the long-established and successful Société de Crédit Mobilier Français, which had been founded years earlier by the Péreire brothers. In a remarkable social and economic rise, Bosch became a director of the new Crédit Mobilier in 1887, ushering in a new era of prosperity marked by numerous overseas ventures. Until his hasty flight from France and his forced focus on exclusively Spanish businesses, Bosch had managed major European and American companies financed primarily with French capital, overseeing liquidation and financial restructuring processes for other entities associated with Crédit Mobilier itself; among these were the Société Inmobilière and L’Ancien Comptoir, where Bosch acted effectively.

The fifteen years between this moment and his downfall, at the dawn of the 20th century, shed light on the Catalan banker’s character: an adventurer, given the risks he took in many of his ventures, and a phantom, due to his conceited and presumptuous behavior. Without a doubt, he took on risks and ventures that others, more cautious and measured, had previously rejected, but it is also true that he made extensive use of his image, his “facade,” to open doors and gain access—sometimes through underhanded means—to business ventures backed by high-ranking political circles.

One such example was the Puerto Rican railway, for which he established a company tasked with building a railway network designed primarily to serve the export of coffee, tobacco, and sugarcane. He obtained the concession in 1888 and managed to open a few kilometers of track three years later, but financial problems soon arose, and the island’s eventual fall into American hands ultimately put an end to the project.

At the same time the Puerto Rico railway project was getting underway, Ivo Bosch would involve his company and one of its subsidiaries, Banco General de Madrid, in a railway venture in Spain that had been stalled for nearly twenty years due to a lack of a bidder interested in moving the project forward: the railway line from Linares to Almería. The high construction costs in the rugged terrain of southeastern Andalusia and the poor prospects for profitability in railway operations had deterred any attempts at financing. The subsidy offered by the government was limited to 60,000 pesetas per kilometer. In 1889, this concession was also secured. The reasons for this interest may have been, on the one hand, the business opportunity presented at that time by the export of iron ore to meet intense British demand, or perhaps the desire to use this line as the starting point for the construction of a more extensive railway network, with a view to other major acquisitions: in addition to the Linares-Almería concession, the company would acquire the rights to the Baza-Granada line, the Linares-Puertollano project, and the planned connection fromBaza to La Encina. Had all these projects been completed, the network of