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Coachbuilder, Converter · Madrid, Spain

FIMESA

Financiera Mecánico Eléctrica S.A. of Madrid, a Spanish fire-appliance bodybuilder that put fire bodies on Land Rover, Santana 1300, Avia, Barreiros, Pegaso and IPV chassis. Its light forest tender on the forward-control Santana 1300 — internally the A-109 — was a common sight in Spanish fire stations.

History

FIMESA — Financiera Mecánico Eléctrica S.A. — was a Madrid firm that specialised in firefighting and rescue vehicles, building appliances of various sizes on whatever chassis the brigade had bought: Land Rover, the Santana 1300, Avia, Barreiros, IPV and Pegaso among them. Its appliances reached fire stations across Spain and beyond, including units that served in Valparaíso, Chile. Spanish enthusiast sources associate the firm particularly with the small and medium appliances of the 1970s and 1980s, and with a preference for French Guinard centrifugal pumps.

The Land Rover-derived work that concerns this registry is its light forest tender on the Santana 1300, the forward-control 1.3-tonne truck built at Linares from 1967 to 1978 and nicknamed the 'Chato de Linares'. Catalogued internally as the A-109, it carried a 450-litre water tank at the rear, four side lockers, a roof rack for ladders, two auxiliary seats, a Guinard centrifugal pump with thirty metres of high-pressure hose, a siren, work lamps and a rear towing hook. Compact, four-wheel drive and high-riding, it suited forest tracks and old town centres where a full-size autobomba could not go; brigades at Santiago de Compostela, Lloret de Mar, Girona and Madrid are among those recorded running the type. Larger FIMESA appliances included the A203 on the Pegaso Comet 1091 for Barcelona and the A223 on the Pegaso 1121 for Cádiz.

The company's own corporate history is thinly documented. Spanish sources record that it belonged to Sofico, a conglomerate of financial and construction companies whose activity ceased in 1974 after a property pyramid scheme became one of the great financial scandals of late-Franco Spain, and describe FIMESA today as an extinct firm — but no source traced gives its founding date or the date it stopped trading, and appliances attributed to it appear on chassis built after 1974, so the Sofico collapse cannot be taken as the end of the business.

Vehicles in this registry (2)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-10T05:40:28.275Z · status: researched