In July of 1870, Anton Gaudí and Eduard Toda spent a season in l'Espluga de Francolí, guests for a sister of Josep Ribera, married and established to those village. The three friends of High School visited the monastery neighbor of Santa Maria de Poblet. Ribera had attended the destruction and depredation of images, graves, treasures, etc of the big monastery, from the negligence of the Spanish State, whose had left it without guard from the expropriation of 1835. Anton Gaudí same had two books of the library of Poblet. Ribera wanted to promote the restoration and explained it to his intimate friends Toda and Gaudí, who came off enthralled of pain in front of the ruins. There we swore to converge their efforts, not the ones of the moment, but of those of all the existence, to give back the life and resurrect the soul of the big colossus fallen down in the abandonment and the misery. They distributed themselves the work, with a great juvenile illusion. Gaudí would take care of raising walls, to rework roofs, to reconstruct turns, to cover the mines and holes open by the search engines of the treasure which the popular imagination said that the monks had hidden. Ribera would recount the facts and the exploits of the history to scroll the feelings of the Catalans in favor of the reconstruction. Toda would gather the Archive and the Library and, moreover, would write a book that, printed and sold at six quartos (thirty cents) the copy, it would give the first means to start the work. Gaudí enjoyed some studies in the way how the works should be executed: for the interior walls and in what was not a freemasonry, they would use stone broken, rejecting the pebbles of river used before by the monks, because its smooth and round form did not allow them to agree with the mortar; to make tiles, they would start off the oven of the angle of the path joint in the course of the river Sec and them they sent the production. Finally, for the wood necessary for the constructions and the wood of the oven, they would use the resources of the forest of the Pena, which had completely not been cut. Two bricklayers and four laborers would be the staff of the restoration, with wages of twelve daily reals each one of the first and six daily reals the seconds. They would be able also to occupy some farmers and boys to clean the main buildings and to launch the debris in the square of the old Hospital of Poor People, in front of the Royal Door; this could increase the estimation of costs in four daily reals for each worker. The main source of incomes would be the ticket of a real that they would charge the visitors, who they calculated in some four thousand. Moreover, they would sell the "guide" and they would ask the official institutions and the artistic societies of Barcelona for subsidies. Toda wrote up the complete study of the restoration, using as sheets the back of some proclamations of the Federal Republican Democratic Committee of Reus (presided by his uncle, Josep Güell i Mercader). For the drawing of the plant, Toda copied the sheet of the "Guía de Poblet", that Andreu de Bofarull had published the same 1870 in Reus. Gaudí advised him with respect to construction and architects. The manuscript is titled "Poblet, datos y apuntes" and it is dated on 26 of July of 1870. It includes a drawing of Gaudí: that of the shield of Poblet, copied from an engraving of the book of Jaume de Finestres. After the summer, Ribera, who was orphan, went with his uncles in Andalusia. The University of Barcelona had closed because of the epidemic of yellow fever and Toda was profitable to publishing the small brochure "Poblet, descripción histórica" and afterwards he went to Madrid to study the career of Law. Gaudí remained in Reus until he could go to Barcelona. He continued a lot thrilled with the project, and on 26 November of 1870 wrote to Toda interesting him in Ribera and so that his interest in Poblet had been cooled.