The Torre de la Sagrera air-raid shelter opens to the public
The city’s fourth visitable air-raid shelter, which stands out for its fine state of conservation and the use that local people and workers made of it in the Spanish Civil War, is open to small groups on Fridays and Saturdays. Admission costs 3 euros.
An estimated 1,400 air-raid shelters were built in Barcelona from 1937. With the opening of the Torre de la Sagrera shelter in the district of Sant Andreu, there are now four open to visitors in the city (shelter 307, the shelter beneath Plaça del Diamant, the shelter below Plaça de la Revolució and this one at the Torre de la Sagrera).
This shelter did not appear until 2014, during some renovation and extension work on the building of the Torre de la Sagrera to turn it into a neighbourhood centre, when the construction was found in a fine state of conservation.
The structure is 88 metres long in all, with visitors able to see elements and structures conserved intact since 1937, such as latrines, a water spring, ventilation shafts, a pantry, drawings and writing on the walls and electric cabling and porcelain resistors, as well as a couple of original light bulbs.
Managed by the Federació Torre de la Sagrera, guided tours for members of the public are to be conducted on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings in groups of up to five people, at a cost of 3 euros, and on Friday morning for schools (secondary and sixth form).
Shelter for local people and workers
The Torre de la Sagrera air-raid shelter was built privately and ended up being used by local people and workers in the neighbourhood working in nearby industries. The initiative may have been the result of the influence and pressure of the collective company of United Shoe Machinery, housed in the building and not on the census, meaning that it had no number on the list of air-raid shelters of the Anti-Aircraft Passive Defence Service or the Defence Board of the Generalitat (1938), which is why its location was unknown.
The construction dossier for the shelter indicates that it was intended to protect users at a school linked to the Ateneu Cultural de la Sagrera, located at the Torre de la Sagrera, but that the school project was never executed as the property was occupied by members of the CNT-FAI in 1936. The direct entrance to the shelter from inside the building was justified by the activity inside, whether as a school or as a political and cultural entity.
The museum project for the shelter aims to highlight the space and its context, with sounds and graphic elements for a more immersive experience during the tour, and emphasise the social character it had during the Spanish Civil War.
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