The underground Barcelona hides one of the most painful episodes of the city. A few meters deep, there are still numerous anti-aircraft shelters that saved thousands of lives from the bombardments of the Italian Legionary Aviation during the Civil War. Some of these spaces are accessible today and remain hidden in unexpected places.
Few would imagine that behind a tiny door in the kitchen of the Pia de Sarrià school, while vegetables are being cut and potatoes are being fried, an old refuge is hidden. It is number 924 and it was part of the Popular School of War when it was installed in this location from August 1936 on the initiative of the Generalitat de Catalunya where nearly two thousand officers were trained.
“It is an attempt to visualize by the Republican forces that it will not be a short war and they were trying to dress the Aragon front. The school will end up being a model for other future schools of the popular republican army”, explains the historian Xavier Domènech.
He and the journalist and photographer Ana Sánchez are the curators of an international conference that will be held this Thursday and Friday in the former Eixample Model prison, in which they will reflect on this underground heritage of the city and share experiences from other European cities. such as London, Berlin and Paris.
After this work there are two intense years of tracking refuges, requesting permits and scheduling visits from a 1938 census in which more than 1,300 refuges were counted, although experts consider that there are many more and the figure could reach 2,000 in Barcelona. Some remain as if time had frozen eight decades ago with remains of cans, shovels, buckets or mirrors. “They are spaces with a transforming beauty. They are not ruins. The great obstacle to photographing the subsoil has been the humidity because the lens was permanently fogged up”, explains Sánchez.
Visiting them has not been an easy task either, since to guarantee safety it has sometimes been necessary for the Mossos d’Esquadra underground unit to intervene in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council Archeology Service to verify if there was enough oxygen and discard the presence of toxic gases. Sánchez has taken pictures with water up to his knees and on some occasions he has had to resort to autonomous reinforcement spotlights.
In total, they have been able to access a quarantine, some of them unpublished, and have investigated some 400 spaces. This material will also be seen with an artistic look in an exhibition with large-format photographs at the Modelo de Barcelona from March 30 to July 31. A sample that will have its version in book form.
“With this series of actions we also wonder about the refuge object today. We have to continue working on the study and dissemination of these heritage vestiges as we have been doing for decades, but now we are asking ourselves how we have to work on them, what to do with them and how we explain them”, highlights Jordi Rabassa, the Councilor for Democratic Memory, the area in charge of organizing the sessions through the Icub and the European observatory of memories of the Fundació Solidaritat UB.
Another of the questions raised by Rabassa is that if in addition to having the web page ‘La ciutat dels refugis’ in which this heritage is disseminated or arranging a visit to a refuge it is “if we want specific signage in the public space to point them out ”.
After the war, some of these places had multiple lives. For example, the shelter that can be visited at 307 on Nou de la Rambla street was used to grow mushrooms and others were the shelter for families without resources during the first waves of migrants in the 50s and 60s. “When the shelters were built, the republican institutions did not they think that the war will end with Franco’s victory and they were designed to be libraries and other civic uses later. In the neighborhood of Gràcia, the possibility of connecting all of them and making an underground city was even considered”, points out Domènech. In London some have been reused as orchards or in Berlin there are Nazi bunkers converted into art galleries.
It is estimated that in Barcelona there were 2,700 fatalities from the bombings, although they are probably more and left some 7,000 injured and 1,800 buildings damaged. “It is the first European city in which saturation bombings on the civilian population take place. The rearguard becomes a space for war and civilian victims are the objective, which is why it is said that it is total war”, comments the historian.
The other side of the coin of this barbarism was the reaction of the population with an enormous response capacity in times of maximum difficulty with its own model of passive defense. “It was a colossal collective effort that was largely a mirror of the Catalan society of the time and in the case of Barcelona with a very dense social fabric and very powerful republican values”, points out Domènech. “The Barcelona model was baptized by the British Parliament at the gates of the Second World War when they were considering how a city like London should be protected”, adds Sánchez.
As for typologies, most were for community uses, although it was also devised for political leaders such as the one intended to protect the life of the president of the Spanish republic Juan Negrín, near the Pedralbes palace. Now, these spaces that citizens step on daily claim their heritage value.
