There is a lot of talk about memory, but in our society they don’t take long to forget. The musician Enric Granados –known here by his street in Barcelona’s Eixample– had the pleasure of inaugurating his auditorium on Avenida Tibidabo, 18, built for this purpose by Dr. Salvador Andreu on February 4, 1912.
Just seven years ago, in 2016, the centenary of the tragic death of the musician born in Lleida in 1867 was commemorated. ), Civil War in between, and for the abandonment of years when evicting it. Neither before nor after the cultural and heritage public administrations marked the place with a plaque or were interested in memory. And not for lack of information and proposals, by the way: the Salvem la Sala Granados platform had already been established and in 2012, on the occasion of the centenary of its inauguration, we talked about the subject in these pages.
In a chance meeting, the person in charge of Seguros Reale (then owners of the property) stated that he had no idea about the matter, since he had been in his position for a short time. Then silence… For the City Council at that time, the issue was difficult, since it was private property, and for the later… We already know what their commitment to culture was, which even did not see it as a bad thing that there were squatters in what was Torres’s workshop García in Sarrià… Meanwhile, important entities are considering projects for the construction of new theaters, and at the same time, testimonials of Barcelona’s culture such as the Arnau theater or the Principal theater barely remain standing….
In the summer of 2018 the pickaxe arrived and the demolition of Tibidabo, 18… The anonymous façade was left cracked and propped up with its four muses, waiting for a storm to make it fall and lack of memory definitively triumph.