The urbanization works of the future park of the old Castells de les Corts neighborhood continue and some structures are already visible, such as some huge canopies that will support a large pergola. The works began in summer and are late as the green area was expected to be finished in February of this year, as stated in the information poster, but this mandate will not give the political authorities time to inaugurate it and it is expected to be completed in June, informs the Barcelona City Council. The work represents an important step to complete an urban process started two decades ago. With an investment of three million euros, the park will have about 10,000 m2 with a central square where activities will take place, community gardens, a children’s and sports playground, as well as planting trees.
The elaboration of the project had a participatory process in 2018, although the works started without all the neighborhood consensus and even a platform that groups different entities called for its suspension and presented an alternative proposal. They did not look favorably on the project, considering that it “erases the appearance of the colony” and they demanded to recover the old layouts of the passages. In this line, Adela Agelet, secretary of the neighborhood association of Les Corts, denounces that the current design “distorts” the historical past of this place. “Life in the neighborhood was carried out on the street, which is why we requested that the paths of the passages be the directing axes of the urbanization of the park. They tell us that they install some canopies through which the passages passed. It is a lack of respect for the neighbors and for the memory of the neighborhood itself, â€says Agelet.
The City Council defends that the project does value the historical memory with the conservation of nine small houses of the Piera passage and the facades with the front patios of nine more houses, which “will make it possible to preserve the layout of one of the roads of the cologne”. As for future uses, work is being done on the draft of the old workers’ houses so that they can be a space for the neighborhood and other activities that will take place once they have been rehabilitated. The idea is that some of them function as a memory center for the neighborhood, that in others everything from talks to exhibitions are organized and that a couple of them are used as storage for garden tools and park service facilities. This will still take time to become a reality since being in a green zone, a process of reclassification of the land of this plot must be carried out as equipment. Municipal sources add that the park will incorporate informative elements that will recall the history of the environment.
Another point of controversy has been the location of the orchards. The neighborhood entity requests that it be moved after the houses of the Piera passage on the Equador street side, instead of Montnegre street, so that the entrance to the park can be expanded at this point “also facilitating access to users of the socio-sanitary facilities on this sideâ€.
Due to the bonds that were formed between the neighbors and the lifestyle, the neighborhood was like a small town in the middle of the big city. The little houses were built from 1923 to house the workers of a nearby factory, owned by Agustà Castells and specialized in oilcloth and varnish. The initial project contemplated 20 houses but in the end more than a hundred were built. At its peak, more than 700 people lived there, mainly from Castilla-La Mancha, Valencia, Murcia, Aragon and Andalusia. Its closure in the early 2000s was followed by an urban development and expropriation process with the final approval in 2003 of the modification of the General Metropolitan Plan in this area. A transformation that continues to this day.
