The City Council of Girona has today removed the last remaining telephone booth in the city. Located at the end of La Rambla, it didn’t work and looked pitiful, full of scratched paint and plastered with posters.
In this way, it is not strange that today many of the pedestrians on this central street do not even realize the existence of what was once considered a right and an essential public service for any population of more than a thousand inhabitants.
The new stage that opened with the mobile phone and new technologies is well known. These gadgets that we cannot get away from today gradually cornered the use of public telephones in towns and cities.
In 2015, there were still a total of 31 cabins in Girona. Between that year and 2022, six were removed from public roads and since then the rest have been eliminated, until today the last trace of the media has been erased. On January 1, 2022, Telefónica was no longer obliged to provide the service, at which point they began to dismantle many public spaces.
Some workers have embezzled the structure and loaded it onto a truck, which went to a scrapping company in Tarragona. The scene took place this morning between the indifference and curiosity of those who were walking through the area.
In statements collected by the Catalan News Agency (ACN), Toni Sirvent, 77, who worked in a business near the cabin, recalled that he often used it to call his family. “It is normal that they have removed it, with cell phones today no one uses them,” he explained.
Another neighbor, Maria Teresa Vidal, remembered how “sometimes the booth kept the coins and you couldn’t call and other times the conversation was cut off in half.” Memories of another time.
