Women and feminism

A nurse by vocation, she led the modernisation of the Santa Creu i Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona, which changed from a charity to professional-care model. She trained at the Government of Catalonia Nursing School and at the University of Barcelona Faculty of Medicine but it was in England where she learned the fundamental teachings of modern nursing, at the professional school founded by another pioneering woman, Florence Nightingale. The model she implemented in the Barcelona hospital is based on 24-hour care, and she was also responsible for starting the first specialised nursing units, such as intensive care, emergency care and paediatrics. Likewise, she created the hospital's nursing school, where she taught innovative techniques. Currently, Barcelona's Official Association of Nurses is located in the district of Sant Martí, very near the Maresme-Fòrum metro station.

An influential midfielder, playmaker and icon for younger generations. The captain of Barcelona's first division women’s team, she received the Best Catalan Player of the Year award in 2015, and she is the first woman in the world to win the Golden Ball two years in a row, as well as being the first Spanish player, male or female, to do so. She is also the first woman to score a goal in the Johan Cruyff Stadium and the Camp Nou in modern times. In 2021, she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross), which she received with a speech protesting against the lack of equal opportunities between men and women in sport and in all other fields. Palau Reial is one of the notable metro stations near Camp Nou, but it is not the only place in the city that may bring this football player to mind. In Gràcia, there is a mural that makes it clear: Alèxia, as a modern heroine, reminds us that we have to “chase our dreams”.

She was the driving force behind the women's strike of 1918, a protest that started as a mobilisation due to an increase in the price of coal and basic food items, such as bread. A social activist and feminist who lived in the city's District Five – the present-day Raval – where she called her neighbours to the doors of the Civil Governor’s building to protest that workers could not afford the increased prices and faced hardship to survive the winter. The protest eventually mobilised thousands of women and their action culminated in a public denouncement of the terrible situation of women in society. The metro stop at Mercabarna, the most important food distribution point in the Metropolitan Area, bears her name.

This writer and exponent of the spiritualist movement ran the magazine La luz del porvenir, which dealt with issues relating to spiritualism, which only women wrote in and was censored. Her literary talent came out at a very early age, but in her youth she had to work as a seamstress in order to survive. She defended women's right to training and secular education. She also wrote for the Gaceta de Cataluña and the magazine Revista de Estudios Psicológicos, among other publications. With frail health and seriously impaired vision, she found that spiritualism was a way of making sense of her life. She came across this school of thought in the 1870s, through the specialist publication a El Criterio, and she stayed with it, eventually becoming one of the leading exponents of esoteric material of the time. She was closely linked to the La Buena Nueva Spiritualist Centre, in Gràcia.

A feminist and community activist and La Verneda neighbourhood resident who belonged to a generation of women who were not content with putting “Her work is her profession” on her ID document. In 1985, she pushed for the creation of  the La Tela de Penelope association, a meeting point with talks and activities geared towards defending women's rights in favour of their participation in public life, and which now forms part of the Sant Martí Civic Centre, very near the metro station that bears her name. In 2017, her work was recognised with the Jardins d’Ana Figuera, a garden project drawn up and promoted by the Memory and Gender Commission in her district, which worked with the Local Residents Association in Sant Martí de Provençals.

The creator of fantasy and realistic worlds, from imaginary kingdoms to scenes from the Spanish Civil War. A writer who won the 1954 Planeta Award and the 2010 Cervantes Award. She was the custodian of Seat K in the Royal Spanish Academy for 16 years, and the third woman to find a place among the academics. This novelist, a leading author of children’s and young adult literature, needs no more introduction than her long, prolific and successful career: from her first book, Los Abel, where we face demons and the misery of the war and post-war period, to her last published novel, Paraísos inhabitados, where we explore the hypnotic world of a girl. Matute's pen is a safe refuge for readers who like to lose themselves in the pages of a book. Our memory of the writer is all around us, from the plaque on the façade of her family's home, very near the El Putxet FGC train station, to the street that was named after her a year ago, on the dividing line between the districts of Gràcia and Horta-Guinardó.

An economist, urban planner and professor of Urban Sociology at the Uiversity of Barcelona (UB) who was an anti-Franco activist and took part in local-resident struggles to improve their neighbourhoods. In addition to jointly fostering the map of the city's neighbourhoods, she was a leading light in the Federation of Barcelona Local Residents Associations (FAVB). With the aim of giving Barcelona's neighbourhoods a voice in the 1992 Olympic Games framework, she wanted to showcase that other reality which remained out of the spotlight, namely that of a city where inequality created a territorial and socio-economic divide. Her bibliography covers everything from the influence of the local-resident movement on urban planning to the socio-economic dynamics of the city's neighbourhoods, as well as social exclusion, youth in the city, the housing market and family solidarity. Thanks to the donation of around 800 documents, the UB conserves the personal archives that bear her name. Furthermore, since 2018 the Catalan Association of Political Science and Sociology Professionals awards the Miquel Caminal and Anna Alabart Prizes, which recognise the best final degree projects in a wide range of courses in the social and political spheres.

An actress who was one of the first members of the Comediants Theatre Company and who co-founded the Teatre Lliure, where she developed a prolific career. She studied Dramatic Art at the Centre of Expermental Studies in Barcelona before moving to Paris in 1974, where she studied with the mime artist Jacques Lecoq. On returning to Barcelona, two years later, she associated with a group of directors, performers and technicians with whom she founded the Lliure, the stage where her talent was most often displayed, with over 30 productions. An actress on both the small and big screen, she worked with Pedro Almodóvar and Ventura Pons. In 2018, her name was immortalised in the nomenclature of Barcelona: the square that bears her name is where the Ribes, Sicília and Alí Bei streets meet, in the Fort Pienc neighbourhood.  The Teatre Lliure de Gràcia is located near the metro L3 Fontana stop.

A pioneer in introducing contemporary dance and jazz into Catalonia, she was part of the corps de ballet at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. She trained in classical and Spanish dance with Joan Magriñà and Emma Maleras, respectively. She later broadened her training by studying jazz at the Hightower Dance Centre in Cannes. In addition to being a choreographer, she consolidated her dance teacher-populariser side by creating the Anna Maleras Studio in 1967, very near the Sant Gervasi FGC train station, and the Anna Maleras Study Group (1972-1989). She has held some important posts during her career and was a member of the Spanish Ministry of Culture Dance Council. She has also won a number of awards, including the City of Barcelona Gold Medal (2019).

A pioneer in promoting and giving a voice to women's sport who was a renowned athlete and journalist, and who also explored the fields of poetry, painting and photography. With regard to sport, she won the National Javelin Championship in 1931 and she was the first woman to join the Futbol Club Barcelona board, in 1934. Along with other women, she was also behind the creation of Club Femení i d’Esports, a pioneering sports organisation exclusively for women in Spain. She was an anti-fascist activist who suffered reprisals, went into exile in France and later moved to the United States, where she lectured at the University of Illinois. Her poems include Laberinto de presencias (1969). She returned to Barcelona at the end of the Franco regime, and in 1999, the Women Journalists’ Association awarded her the Rosa del Desert Prize, shared with Rosa Murià, in recognition of her career as a journalist. Collblanc is one of the metro stops near Camp Nou.

An entrepreneur, teacher and feminist activist who created the first micro-credit programme for women entrepreneurs in Catalonia in 1999. Her links to promoting the rights of women go back a long way. In 1975, she took part in the first International Women’s Year congress in Berlin, and in 1976, she helped to organise the first Catalan Women's Conference. Her contributions include setting up the Women's Technical Centre in 1988, an institution geared towards training and career guidance for women. Furthermore, she heads the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce’s Women, Business and Economy Observatory. In 2020, she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in recognition of her work.

Mas Blau is an industrial location characterised by the diversification of activities, geared towards the production, expansion and economic growth of the business fabric.

With a BA Honours in Journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), she became TV3’s first black newsreader in October 2022. She has previously worked as a reporter, announcer and editor for RAC1, RTVE, the magazine of the Association of Catalan Journalists (CPC) and El 9 Nou. She has reported on the under-representation of black women in the media on numerous occasions, and it was the subject her thesis, On són les dones negres? (Where are the black women?). Feminisme africà i la representació de les dones africanes a la premsa catalana (African feminism and the representation of African women in the Catalan press), which received a UAB Award as one of the best projects with a gender perspective.

Last year, the acclaimed director and screenwriter of Alcarràs won the Berlinale Golden Bear for her second feature film, which became the first Catalan-language film to receive this award, as well as winning five Gaudís. With her first feature film, Estiu 1993 (The summer of 1993), she won the Gaudí Award for best director and established herself as one of the new faces of contemporary cinema, with the naturalistic, everyday vision that characterises her work. She studied Audiovisual Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and, subsequently, the TV3 Master's Degree in Television Innovation and Quality and an MA at the London Film School, where she also directed the documentary Born Positive (2012) and the short fiction film Lipstik (2013).

A teacher and pedagogue who advocated special education and the methodologies of Maria Montessori. Her contributions helped to found the School of Expression and Psychomotricity in 1974. Her career in the field of special education began during the post-war period, when she met Dr. Jeroni de Moragas, a leading figure in Catalan education and psychology who ran his own centre, where he continued the Decroly and Montessori methods that had been introduced during the Second Republic. In 1959 she sat the Barcelona City Council competitive examinations and won a place as a teacher at Vil·la Joana School, where she continued to work in the field of special education. At the same time, she trained in the field by travelling around Europe, eventually becoming an expert in expression and educating people. She won the Antoni Balmanya Award for her work L'expressió, mitjà de desenvolupament’ (Expression, a means of development). In 1991 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’ s Cross from the Government of Catalonia. The Les Planes stop is near Vil·la Joana School.

An anti-Franco activist and member of both Esquerra Republicana (ERC – Republican Left of Catalonia) and Estat Català (Catalan State), she was condemned to death by a summary war council and became the first woman to be shot at Camp de la Bota on the morning of 18 April 1939. Born in Tarragonès county, she settled in Badalona, where she worked as a shop assistant in a haberdashery run by Angelina Picas. A neighbour who had an interest in running the shop and who got along well with Mrs. Picas's nephews and nieces reported her. She was arrested along with the shopkeeper by the Falangists. The accusation, military rebellion and rebellion against the legitimate powers of the State, was linked to the false argument of having betrayed and caused the death of right-wing people throughout the Republic. The war council was held at the Palau de Justícia in Barcelona, where she was sentenced to death. Today, Carme Claramunt i Barot's name can be read on the memorial mural at Camp de la Bota, along with those of the 1,706 people executed by the Franco regime between 1939 and 1952.

A pioneer of Catalan feminism in the 20th century who was also a writer, musician, journalist, publicist and teacher. She defended women's right to vote and was a member of the group behind the Catalan Women’s Pacifist Committee and the feminist association Acció Femenina. She combined the practice of all disciplines with teaching and was particularly involved in access to women's education. She taught at La Llar, a school for female students founded in 1913, lectured at the Ateneu de Barcelona and directed the women's pavilion at the Barcelona International Exhibition in 1929. Her bibliography includes novels, essays, plays, literary criticism, children's and young people's fiction and plays. Nowadays, there is a street devoted to her memory in Sarrià.

Architect, professor and speaker. The most emblematic architectural projects that she has directed from her studio are the Torre Cube in Mexico, the CaixaForum in Zaragoza, the Massana School of Arts and Crafts in Barcelona, the remodelling of Plaça Gardunya and the rear façade of the Boqueria. Previously she had worked at the Enric Miralles studio. She currently combines her work as an architect with teaching. In recognition of her career she has received several awards. At national level, she received the National Architecture Prize in 2022 and in 2005 she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross). Internationally, her work has been recognised with the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in 2022, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Prix des Femmes Architectes (2017), and the ICO Museum in Madrid dedicated a retrospective exhibition to her in 2021, the first of its kind on a woman architect. One of the projects she has designed, La Llauna Secondary School, is close to the metro L2 Pep Ventura stop.

Chef and food educator. She is an international leader in avant-garde Catalan cuisine. In her home town, Sant Pol de Mar, she ran the Sant Pau restaurant from 1988 until 2018, when she decided to close it and move onto a new stage. Her work as head chef at Sant Pau was recognised with three stars in the Michelin Guide. Last year, her son, Raül Balam, reopened the restaurant under the name of Cuina Sant Pau. Despite the closure of Sant Pau, Ruscalleda runs two more restaurants: the Sant Pau restaurant in Tokyo, which has been open since 2004 and has one Michelin star, and Moments de Barcelona, which has two. In 1998 she received the National Gastronomy Award and in 2004 she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) by the Catalan Government in recognition of her career. Parc de Joan Miró is very close to the L3 Tarragona stop. Before it became a park, it was the site of the city's old slaughterhouse.

A nationally and internationally renowned flamenco dancer, or bailaora, singer and actress. She was born in the shanties of Somorrostro, into a gypsy family. She became a professional artist in Barcelona, alongside her father, who was a guitarist, before the Spanish Civil War. At a very young age, she performed during the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition.

She achieved success gradually, first with the films La hija de Juan Simón (1935) and María de la O (1936), and then later internationally, with various films made in Hollywood. At the end of her career, she starred in Los Tarantos, a film by F. Rovira-Beleta, shot in Barcelona, which received an Oscar nomination in 1963. She performed in the best venues of North and Latin America, Europe and Africa (Teatro Maravillas in Buenos Aires, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, the Champs Élysées in Paris), dancing in front of President F.D. Roosevelt and the artist Jean Cocteau, among others.

She was a literary agent known for her efforts in favour of copyright and is considered the mastermind behind the rise in Latin American literature. She represented universal authors such as the Nobel Prize winners Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda and Camilo José Cela, as well as other renowned authors such as Julio Cortázar, Rosa Montero, Terenci Moix and Isabel Allende. She also promoted the translations of numerous international literary works, especially English-language ones, into Spanish. In 2005 she was awarded an honorary degree by the UBA, and in 2006 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) from the Catalan Government. Today the square in front of the Gabriel García Márquez Library, in the Sant Martí de Provençals neighbourhood, is named after her.

Her literary agency continues to operate at Avinguda Diagonal, 580, very close to the L5 Diagonal metro station.

A famous singer and theatre and TV artist who help to visualise transsexuality in her performances at Barcelona's theatres. She was a victim of repression during the Franco regime due to her homosexuality. Following the Transition, she came up with a figure who made transsexuality visible in various erotic-festive shows. In the 1990s, she received a lot of media attention for her appearances in different TV programmes. She also made the leap into politics and in 2010 she was second on the list of the Coordinadora Reusenca Independent (CORI – Independent Reus Coordinator) party, which stood in the Catalan general election.

For decades she was an icon of nightlife in the Raval. The El Cangrejo nightclub, where Mairena used to perform her shows, is close to the metro L3 Drassanes stop.

Nada and Laforet is one of those inseparable work-author duos. This writer of novels, short stories, tales, travel diaries and numerous press articles established herself as one of the great authors of Spanish and universal narrative with this work, winner of the Premio Nadal in 1944, at the age of just 22. Her success brought praise from some great literary figures of the time: Azorín, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Ramón J. Sender-. Although her career as a writer continued, Nada marked a turning point. She stepped back from the literary world in the mid-1970s but in 2003 she published a collection of 76 letters resulting from an epistolary relationship with Sender, in which, among other themes, she reflected on the difficulty of being and writing as a woman. Among the numerous posthumous tributes, her portrait was painted at the Ateneu de Madrid (2021), and she was the second woman to be included, after Emilia Pardo Bazán. The Virrei Amat metro stop is very close to the square devoted to her memory.

A virtuoso concert harpist and composer, she was known by the artistic pseudonym of Esmeralda Cervantes: Esmeralda, for the heroine of one of Victor Hugo's most important works, and Cervantes, for the writer of Don Quixote. As a concert performer, she was a child prodigy, starting her world tours when she was only 14 years old. She has been honoured in the best theatres and noble salons around the globe, from Japan to Russia and the United States. In Vienna she played with the Richard Strauss orchestra and in Rome she took part in the last concert of the virtuoso composer and pianist Franz Liszt. In 1883, along with Dr Dolors Aleu, she founded the Academy of Sciences, Arts and Crafts for Women in Barcelona. She was a feminist activist, an opponent of slavery and a defender of human rights. She also managed popular magazines and promoted the international publication of magazines such as L'Etoile Polaire (The Polar Star). She was the illegitimate daughter of another famous figure, the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà. The gardens devoted to Clotilde Cerdà are located near the L1 Glòries stop. 

The history of Barcelona in the 1960s and 70s would not be the same without her photographs. Linked to Barcelona's Gauche Divine, her prolific work includes portraits of Carmen Amaya, Antonio Gades and La Chunga, among other important artists and intellectuals of the time. However, her aim was also to capture the atmosphere of the Somorrostro shacks and La Rambla.  She was bornin the heart of L’Eixample, and studied Literature in Barcelona and French Civilisation at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Upon her return, she collaborated with the progressive press during the last period of Franco's dictatorship. Cinematography is one of her great passions, and she took part in the film movement generated around the Barcelona School, which included Vicente Aranda, Jacinto Esteva and Jaime Camino. Her works are part of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) collection. She has received a number of outstanding awards such as the Spanish National Photography Prize in 2014, which she rejected in protest against the situation of culture and education in Spain. In 2021 the central government awarded her the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.

An anti-Franco militiawoman from the Les Corts neighbourhood who was one of the seven women in the group of one hundred armed soldiers known as the Aguilons de les Corts, whose aim was to fight Franco's troops during the Civil War. She took part in the attack on the Model prison to free political prisoners and in the armed struggle at the Pedralbes Barracks, where she remembers they had guns but had forgotten the bullets. A few years earlier, in 1933, she had been arrested for being in possession of a pistol and ended up in the Reina Amàlia women's prison, which was demolished in 1936 and where today a memorial lectern can be found. In December 1938 she crossed the French border and ended up in the Argelès-sur-Mer refugee camp. In 1942 she returned to Barcelona and opened a stall at Sant Antoni Market, which became a clandestine meeting point for the anarchist movement. Linked to the CNT and CGT trade unions, she is a local icon of anti-fascist activism and participated in local associations. At the end of the 1990s she joined the Women of '36 collective, which works to reclaim and restore the memory of women who suffered repression during the Civil War.

A designer of hats and ornamental headwear who worked in a workshop and shop on Carrer del Progrés, No. 23, in Badalona, very close to the Gorg L10 metro station. There, in the 1950s and 60s, she designed and made original, elegant hats for special festive occasions. In 2013, the designer's granddaughters donated the collection, made up of around 120 pieces, to Badalona Museum.

A writer, translator, feminist and political activist. In the 1960s, she went into exile in Barcelona, fleeing from the Uruguayan dictatorship. Most of her literary creations were produced in the city. She cultivated various genres, including poetry, narrative and essays. In recognition of her career, she received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Literature in 2021.

In addition to literature, she also stands out for her political and pacifist activism, as well as for her defence of women's rights and LGTBIQ+ persons.

She has lived in various Barcelona districts, but she first lived in Sant Andreu.

An activist, feminist and a living memory of the local-resident struggle in the city. She played a leading role in eliminating the city's shanty towns and dignifying El Carmel and Can Baró. She dedicated her entire life to demanding basic services and better living conditions for her neighbours. She arrived in Barcelona with her family in 1947. She was the first woman from the El Carmel shanty town to graduate from university, where she studied nursing. In Can Baró, she ran the local resident association for decades. Thanks to her local-resident movement, she achieved basic services for the neighbourhoods, including a sewer system, street lighting and paving, improved public transport communication, as well as facilitating access to a school and a primary care centre. In the 1960s, she promoted sex and contraceptive education among women in El Carmel. In 2009, her struggle was recognised with the Barcelona Medal of Honour, and in 2021 she gave the opening speech at the La Mercè festival.

A doctor, gynaecologist and professor who created the Fine Arts and Crafts Academy for Women in 1885, together with Clotilde Cerdà, where she taught domestic hygiene. In 1882, she was the first woman medicine graduate to exercise her profession and the second, after Maria Elena Maseras, to obtain her doctorate, with her thesis On the need for a new approach to women's hygiene-moral education. The text criticised the use of corsets for medical purposes, as it put women's health at risk. She specialised in gynaecology and paediatrics. She was also the first women to be a member of the Société Française d’Hygiène. For 25 years she ran a medical surgery on Rambla de Catalunya. And she combined medicine with teaching, writing informative texts on improving the lives of mothers and the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases.

The Dolors Aleu Secondary School near the Navas L1 metro station has been open since 2021.

Writer, journalist and activist. She wrote numerous publications, including novels, essays, poetry, theatre and informative press articles. The situation of women featured in all of her works. Prominent among these is La fabricanta (1904), a novel featuring a working-class girl who manages to get ahead through her own efforts. From a conservative feminist perspective, she published texts with pioneering contributions, such as Estudi feminista (1909). She pushed for the creation of the Needleworkers Association (1910), with the aim of establishing a structure for advice and protection, as well as free medical assistance and employment guidance. She was the first woman president of the Barcelona Floral Games, in 1910, when the prize was won by Víctor Català, with his novel Solitud.

Piera was the first female Barcelona city councillor, between 1937 and 1939. She was a teacher, politician, trade unionist and feminist activist. During the Spanish Civil War, as a city councillor, she assisted those refugees most in need, especially children. She was also the general secretary of the Women's Union of Catalonia. At the end of the war, she went into exile in France, where she worked in the International Office for Children, in Paris, but at the start of the Second World War, she was detained and imprisoned. On her release, she boarded the ocean liner Cuba with her sister, sailing to the Dominican Republic. She finally moved to Chile, where she settled with her family, never moving on again. In Chile, she renewed her teaching career, continued to defend women's rights and helped to organise the first Women's Congress in Santiago de Chile.

Her metro station is Baixador de Vallvidrera. I don’t know the connection.

During the Spanish Civil War, she piloted a seaplane for the Republican army, from which she monitored enemy ships and recorded air movements in Barcelona and Valencia. She trained at the Institute of Culture and the Women's Popular Library and worked as a piano teacher, thanks to her education in musical language. From an early age, she was a member of the Club Aéreo Popular de Barcelona, through which she obtained a grant in 1933. She combined her training in the field of aviation with her musical education and private classes for her students, until she qualified as a pilot in 1934. At the start of the Spanish Civil War she was called up by decree by the head of Naval Aeronautics in Barcelona, to work as an ensign. In this context, she was transferred to the Military Aviators School, where civil pilots were taught, and she met the pioneer aviator Mari Pepa Colomer, with whom she worked until the El Prat aerodrome was bombed in 1938. After the war, the dictatorship took reprisals against her father, a municipal judge, and she assumed responsibility for the subsistence of her family.

Countess of Barcelona and Septimania, she is considered to be the first female writer of the 9th century. Born into a noble Carolingian family around 803, she was married to Bernat de Septimania, the Count of Barcelona. In 826, after the birth of her first child, the Count sent her to the Chateau de Uzés, in France, a forced exile from which she never returned. Alone and separated from her family, she learned to govern the lands of her husband, who visited her and with whom she had two more children, who were also separated from their mother using political and military arguments. Around 841, she wrote a manual of religious, moral and practical advice for her son Guillem, who was 16 years old: Liber manualis, a copy of which is currently conserved in the Library of Catalonia. The Besòs-Mar metro stop is close to Carrer de Duoda.

Her dystopian poem End of the Century, 1984 is considered by some authors to be a fundamental influence on George Orwell's universal classic 1984, which was published in 1949. O’Shaughnessy wrote her work in 1934, the same year she entered the University College of London to study Psychology. There she met Orwell and married him in 1936. That same year, the couple moved to Barcelona, where she worked as a volunteer, helping to collect the British citizens arriving in the city to join the Republican forces. The couple left the city and returned to the UK in 1937, when the situation in Barcelona got worse and after Orwell was shot in the throat. During the Second World War, she worked for various British government ministries, but her health started to decline and she died before the end of the war.

A doctor and a pioneer in including the gender perspective in healthcare issues. She is currently the head of the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital as well as the Maternal and Foetal Medicine Research Group. She is president of the Gender Policy Advisory Council, and in 2015, she was chosen as the best gynaecologist in Spain by Forbes magazine. She specialises in foetal medicine and surgery, as well as the prevention of premature birth. In recent years, she has also focused on prenatal surgical correction in babies with spina bifida. She is also a Catalan Government healthcare consultant. She was a member of the Women Speakers of Gràcia, and in 2018, she gave the opening speech at Gràcia's summer festival, where she made a plea in favour of sisterhood and the right of all women to make decisions about their own bodies.

She is considered the first female Spanish film director for her silent film Thais. At the start of her career, she was a vaudeville artist, working in the theatres on Paral·lel at the turn of the century. From 1909 onwards, she simultaneously collaborated with Adrià Gual's Intimate Theatre, and she discovered the work of Margarida Xirgu, who was a reference for her. She enriched her experience in show business by performing with the Enric Borrás and Josep Sanpere companies, in roles that gave her public recognition, including La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman), by Henry Bataille. Although a theatre named after her was built in Via Laietana in 1918, it was never inaugurated. Her connection to cinematography began early on, in 1916, when she worked with Studio Films. She worked as a film director and producer, but unfortunately, no copy of her film Thais has been conserved.

Plaça de Montserrat Casals, dedicated to her memory, is near the Llacuna metro station.

She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Barcelona Faculty of Medicine, in 1872, thanks to royal permission from Amadeu de Savoia, as women were not allowed access to university courses. The permission allowed her to study her course, but not attend classes. She was a contemporary of Dolors Aleu, the first woman doctor to exercise her profession, but she was unable to work as a doctor and became a teacher.

A writer, journalist, literary critic and translator of the works of Pushkin and Baudelaire. She is considered to be a member of Las Sinsombrero, a group of transgressive women artists who, in spite of their contributions to literature, poetry and painting, fell into obscurity with the arrival of the Franco regime. The author cultivated prose, poetry and theatre, and she published short stories, such as Lecturas y brisas (1930) and Poemas mediterráneos (1949). It is worth highlighting her novel Una sombra entre los dos (1934), considered to be a vindication of feminism, along with other works, such as Alba Grey (1947). She was a spokesperson for the Ateneu Barcelonès and part of the Eugeni d’Ors cultural circle. The Bonanova metro station is near the house where she lived.

A defender of migrants’ rights, she founded the Centro Boliviano Catalán, the Ballet Tinkuna and Grupo Libélulas, which now works on promoting Bolivian culture and organising shows to highlight the country's rich tradition, featuring popular dances and music. She was an agricultural engineer and a graduate in design and fashion. She worked as an engineer in the Soviet Union and Bolivia. In 1995, she emigrated to Barcelona, where she became part of the Committee for the Defence of Domestic, Cleaning and Care Workers’ Rights. She also worked with the CCOO trade union and the Information Centre for Foreign Workers. The centre she founded is still closely linked to the defence of migrant workers’ rights, with special emphasis on domestic and care workers.

In 2021, she became the first woman to direct the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), and she faces the challenge of restructuring and redefining the institution with the museum's expansion. She studied art history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, She has spent her career at various prestigious international centres, galleries and universities. In 2011, she joined the Tate Modern in London, where she worked with the African Acquisitions Committee to include works relating to the African diaspora in the museum. In 2014, she was the curator for the Gothenburg Contemporary Art Biennial, and from 2018 to 2021, she ran The Showroom gallery in London. MACBA is located near the Sant Antoni L2 metro station.

An iconic neighbourhood activist in Barceloneta who fought real estate speculation and struggled to serve the neighbourhood's identity. She was born and raised in Carrer dels Pescadors and later became one of the leaders of the neighbourhood's social fabric and a defender of the right to housing. Her role in the conflict known as the “Lift Plan” is worthy of note. This was an urban renewal project that would have involved the elimination of 29% of the dwellings in the area and the forced relocation of a significant number of local residents. She worked to preserve the neighbourhood's identity in terms of its history and leisure. In this context, she co-founded and chaired theFestival Committee for Carrer dels Pescadors and the Òstia Local Residents Association. As a tribute, the street formerly called Almirall Aixada has been named after her.

An activist for women's labour rights who was dismissed from a clothing company because of her assertive leadership, which nonetheless led to an improvement in working conditions. She arrived in Barcelona in 1966, at the age of 20, and started to work in the clothing sector. She came into contact with the Young Christian Workers (JOC) and discovered politics and class consciousness. Aware of the precarious situation of workers, her efforts to demand the rights of women workers not only cost her her job, but also meant that she could no longer work in the sector.

A major figure in the struggle for women's and lesbian rights who co-founded the “Feminist Coordinator” in 1976, while also helping to organise the First Catalan Women's Conference. She studied Romance Languages at the University of Oviedo and later moved to Barcelona, where she ran the Communist Movement and was a representative at the Catalan Assembly. She also helped to found the Group Fighting for Lesbian Freedom]. She has dedicated her life to fighting the Francoism, demanding women's rights and fighting to give greater visibility to lesbians, during a period when stigmatisation and persecution affected women like Ana Maria Martínez Sagi and Elisabeth Mulder. The Catalan Government awarded her the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in 2008

The work of this publisher, writer and essayist was constantly linked with women. Doces relatos de mujeres [Twelve Stories about Women], Madres e hijas [Mothers and Daughters], La niña lunática y otros cuentos [The Lunatic Girl and Other Stories] and the collection “A Favor de las Niñas” [In Favour of Girls] are all good examples. She studied Philology and Humanities at the universities of Barcelona and Madrid, specialising in history. With her second work, El amor es un juego solitario [Love is a Solitary Game], the second book of a trilogy, she won the City of Barcelona prize in 1979. She combined writing with her work as a publisher, and she ran the publishing company Editorial Lumen for 40 years. Its hallmark was a commitment to quality authors, including Ana María Matute, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag.

An activist for human and migrant rights. She arrived in Barcelona in the 1990s and was soon a member of various Raval organisations and the Ibn Batuta Social and Cultural Association, which she joined professionally in 1997. She works in various fields, particularly the integration of women. In 2013, she co-founded the Women’s Dialogues Intercultural Association, which she chairs, as a place of welcome and socialisation for migrant women. In recognition of her contribution to the association network and her defence of migrant rights, she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in 2022.

As in Raval, the Sant Ildefons neighbourhood in Cornellà de Llobregat has a mobilised Islamic community that takes part in its association network.

A translator and artist who made her debut as a poet with Una cançó per a ningú i trenta diàlegs inútils (A song for no one and thirty useless dialogues), a work that turned he into a finalist for the Carles Riba Award at the age of 63. She trained at the Massana School of Arts and Trades and the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts, in Barcelona. In 1950, she travelled to Paris, and a year later she decided to settle there permanently. She entered the world of advertising and, at the same time, she privately cultivated her artistic side. Her plastic arts work, still little known, is based on abstract expressionism, although she defines her style as “plurivision”, since her pieces are conceived to be observed from various angles. Her contribution as a multidisciplinary artist specialising in Japanese poetry is also significant. The Felícia Fuster Foundation, which collects paintings, manuscripts and engravings by the artist is located near Plaça Molina.

From 1979 to 2020, Fina Birulés was a Contemporary Philosophy lecturer at the University of Barcelona (UB). She has a PhD in Philosophy and Educational Sciences from the UB. And she combines teaching with research. Her interest lies in political subjectivity, history and action, while also exploring feminist theory and female philosophical production throughout the 20th century, specialising in the work of Hannah Arendt. She founded the Philosophy and Gender Seminar at the University of Barcelona and also the Arendt Thought and Politics Group. She has also been a visiting professor at the universities of Puerto Rico, Chile, Parma, Florence and Vienna. Her career was recognised with various honours, including the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in 2017.

A teacher, politician and activist who promoted the Popular Library for Women and the Institute of Culture, pioneering places that enabled women workers to gain access to training. Women's education and skills acquisition was vital for achieving self-sufficiency and emancipation, fundamental issues on the path towards equality. The Library was a Board of Cooperative Women initiative and it opened in 1909. This was the first library for women at a European level. Some years later it became the Institute of Culture and Popular Library for Women  (better known as La Cultura), which offered classes on feminism, mercantile calculations and stenography, all linked to the public and professional sphere that helped to empower women with skilled jobs. Since the start of the 1920s, the Institute of Culture, now the Espai Francesca Bonnemaison, has been close to the Urquinaona metro station.

A politician, anarchist leader and writer who was the first woman in Spain to become a government minister, during the Second Republic. During the Franco dictatorship, she went into exile in France. Montseny lived with her family in the Guinardó neighbourhood. She wrote a number of short novels that featured feminism, including La indomable, which deals with feminist emancipation. She also published articles in La Revista Blanca, the libertarian magazine published by her parents. In the two years she was the minister of health and social assistance in the Republican Government (1936-1937), she promoted measures in defence of women's dignity and led the first draft bill on abortion. In 1931, she became a member of the anarchist trade union CNT and joined the editorial staff of Solidaridad Obrera. The former headquarters of the trade union are at Arc de Triomf, in the Palau de les Belles Arts. She played an active role in the CNT, becoming an outstanding leader before, during and after the Franco dictatorship.

The life of Gerda Taro is shrouded in mystery. This short-lived, brave woman was a pioneer of her time and left her mark on history. A photographer who shared the legendary pseudonym Robert Capa with Ernö Friedmann, had no doubts about photographing the conflict from the front line. She is considered to be the first photojournalist to cover a war front, during the Spanish Civil War. She documented the Battle of Brunete and died on the front line, while doing her work. Eighty-one years after her death, John Kiszely published on his Twitter account a personal photograph of his father, a doctor in the International Brigades posted to Brunete, attending to a wounded woman, a previously unpublished photograph that narrated the last moments of Gerda Taro’s life (thanks to the writing on the back of the photo revealing the woman's identity) and which, like her story, it took a long time to become widely known.

Philosopher, feminist activist and essayist, who was targeted for her lesbianism. In 1949, at the age of two, she arrived in Barcelona with her family. During the years in which she studied Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, she became involved in different social movements. Her militancy and neighbourhood struggles in El Carmel led her to work as a teacher at Tramuntana School. As an activist, she organised and participated in numerous demonstrations in defence of women's and the LGBTI movement’s rights.

Her work Feminismo de la diferencia (Difference Feminism), published in 1979, presented at the II State Conference on Women, ushered in a state-wide debate on the situation of women. She co-founded the first women’s centre in Barcelona, Casa de la Dona, inaugurated in 1980, and also magazines such as Red Amazonas (1981) and Laberint (1989).

In 1984, together with Dolors Majoral, she opened El centro, the Centre for Women's Studies, a space for feminist research and a place for women to meet. It was located at C/ Roselló 256, near the Joanic L4 metro stop.

This renowned director, screenwriter and producer's curiosity for cinema began very early on: at the age of eight, she was given a Super 8 camera that she used to record her first home movies. She filmed them in Sant Adrià del Besòs, the city where she moved to live when she was seven. Over the course of her career she has won eight Goya awards, the first two for the feature film Mi vida sin mi. She would go on to win four more for La vida secreta de las palabras and three for La libreria. She also picked up two Goyas for best documentary for Escuchando al juez Garzón and Invisibles.

Her films and documentaries have opened and been screened at the official section of film festivals around the world, including Cannes, Toronto, Venice and Berlin. She has garnered recognition and awards for her extensive filmography. Among other distinctions, she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in 2006 and the National Film Award in 2020.

A teacher by profession, she represents a generation of migrants that managed to make their way to Catalonia. Born in Seville, her family migrated to the Raval neighbourhood when she was just six years old. She strongly valued education as a tool for individual and collective improvement, and held a university degree. She worked as a teacher at the Lluís Millet School in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, where she created innovative projects with a transformative spirit. With a group of teachers she created the teacher’s centre Casal del Mestre and she also chaired the Federation of Pedagogical Renewal Movements, as well as representing teachers on the School Council of Catalonia and other local and territorial participation bodies. The Can Zam environmental classroom is named after her.

A worker, teacher and anti-fascist activist, at a young age she joined the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc (BOC) in Girona. In 1934 she arrived in Barcelona and a few months later joined the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). In 1936, in the middle of the Civil War, she was appointed director of the women's prison in Barcelona, where she oversaw remarkable transformations to dignify the lives of the prisoners. She installed showers and also created an infirmary and a nursery for the prisoners’ children. After the events of May 1937, she was removed from her post and imprisoned in a Cheka (secret police) prison. Two days before Franco's troops entered Barcelona down Av Diagonal, on 26 January 1939, an armed group of POUM militants released her and other political prisoners. She went into exile in France, Mexico, Venezuela and, finally, in the United States, where she lived until her death. The largest mass grave of people executed in the Catalan rearguard during the Spanish Civil War is in the Montcada i Reixac cemetery.

Spain's first female photojournalist initially took an interest in photography in her father's photo studio, which was dedicated to sports photojournalism. Her photographs are a portrait of the final decades of the dictatorship and the first years of democracy.  She studied at the School of Journalism and started working as a sports photojournalist, later covering a variety of social, fashion and film events. Her first report was published in the newspaper Mundo Deportivo. Her photographs of the floods in Terrassa in 1962, like her report on the Beatles' visit to Barcelona in 1965, are famous. She worked in many media and agencies and was in charge of still photography in cinematographic projects. In the 1980s, she left photojournalism due to her disagreement with the tabloid style that had taken hold of the profession and opened the restaurant Ca Na Joana in Eivissa (Ibiza).

Her career has been the subject of several exhibitions and she received various distinctions in recognition of her work, including as the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in 2014.

A lifelong resident of El Clot, she was a tireless neighbourhood activist committed to grassroots cooperative work. In 1975 she founded the El Clot - Camp de l'Arpa Residents Association, of which she was a member until the end of her days. With the association, she demanded basic services and improvements in the conditions of working-class neighbourhoods such as El Clot. Apart from her activism, she loved nature and hiking in the hills, joining the rambling association Unió Excursionista de Catalunya (UEC) in Gràcia at a very young age. She also served in the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) during the 1970s.

The gardens in memory of Joana Tomàs i Sabaté can be found next to the Clot metro L1 stop, on C/ València.

A lawyer and politician, who was the first president of the Catalan Women's Institute between 1997 and 1999. In the field of politics, she has been a Barcelona city councillor, as well as a member of the Catalan Parliament, Spain’s Congress of Deputies and the Spanish Senate. She has a degree in Law from the University of Barcelona and in 1976, she began her activism in Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC). The documentation centre of the Catalan Women's Institute bears her name, in recognition of her contributions to the institute.

She was hanged for leading "El rebombori del pa" (The Bread Revolt), a protest that took place toward the end of the 18th century following an increase in the price of this most basic of foods. Known as La Negreta, she organised the neighbourhood to stand up to the abuse of the bourgeoisie, which, with the price of bread, made it even more difficult for the lower classes to subsist. She succeeded: around 8,000 people took to the streets and forced a halt to the price hikes. The reprisals for the revolt, however, led to her and five others being arrested and executed. The sentence was carried out not far from the present-day Plaça de Catalunya, and the neighbourhood refused to attend in protest. About a year ago, the Barcelona nomenclature committee approved the inclusion of Josefa Vilaret as a new street name. As of this March, Carrer del Duc, in Ciutat Vella, will bear the name of a woman who fought and died to combat injustice and inequality.

An oceanographer and biologist, she was the first Spanish woman to participate in an international expedition to Antarctica, together with Marta Estrada. She was also the first woman to direct the Spanish Antarctic Base on Livingston Island, between 1989 and 1997. Close to where the Antarctic base was established, which CaStellví participated in 1986, is the Castellví Peak, named in her honour. She studied Biology at the University of Barcelona and Oceanography at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where she specialised in marine microbiology.

In 1994 she received the City of Barcelona Gold Medal and in 2003 she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross). In 2007 she delivered the opening speech for the Mercè festivities, where she called for a Barcelona nearer to the sea. She was the first scientist to receive the August Pi i Sunyer Medal from the UB Faculty of Medicine, in 2015. In 2019, a plaque was placed at the Institute of Marine Sciences in recognition of her scientific career.

With a diploma in Teaching and degree in Contemporary History, she documented the recent anti-fascist memory of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat in the work L'Hospitalet, lloc de memòria: exili, deportació, repressió i lluita antifranquista (L'Hospitalet, a place of memory: exile, deportation, repression and the anti-Franco struggle). She was a member of the Hospitalet Studies Centre (CELH), an association focused on knowledge, research and debate regarding the city. Between 1995 and 2004, she was a member of the CELH board of directors. In tribute to her contributions, the CELH publishes a collection of books on educational topics.

Anti-fascist activist and co-founder of the association “Les Dones del 36”. As a child, she left the neighbourhood of Sarrià and went into exile in France. After living through the bombing of Figueres, she crossed the border with her mother in February 1939. Her childhood was spent fleeing from one war and experiencing the ravages of the Second World War. In the 1950s, she returned to Barcelona. During the Transition years, she focused on the recovery of historical memory. Later, with a group of women who survived the Civil War, she co-founded the association “Les Dones del 36”. Of all of them, Piquet was the youngest, which is why they give her the nickname "the girl of 36". They created it in 1997 to highlight the experiences of women who suffered repression or exile during the war in institutes, universities and cultural centres. She collaborated with the Museu d’Història de Catalunya. She also participated in the documentary Amnesia, directed by Dani Lagarto Fernández and Jordi Oriola i Folch. The film narrates the exile of Piquet and that of Milanka Ljubojevic, a refugee from the war in Yugoslavia. For her memory and outreach work, Piquet and other representatives of “Les Dones del 36” were awarded the Barcelona Medal of Honour in 2006.

The co-founder of the Roma women’s association Lachó Bají Calí in El Gornal and of the Federation of Roma Associations of Catalonia (1991), she was a touchstone of Roma women’s struggle for recognition. She grew up in a shanty settlement between Barcelona and l'Hospitalet de Llobregat. At just 18 years old, she started working at the Santa Coloma de Gramenet Town Hall as a family worker. Following that, she worked as a mediator and social facilitator, in the Vallès Occidental and Baix Llobregat as well. She was also one of the driving forces behind celebrating International Roma Day on April 8, and she supported a number of initiatives to recover the Roma language in Catalonia.

She was one of the women who suffered repression and torture under the Franco regime for her being a member of the anarchist trade union federation CNT and the Anti-Fascist Youth Union (UJA). She arrived in Santa Coloma de Gramenet with her family in 1921. At just 14 years old, she started working as a weaver at Pañolerias Baró, in the current district of Hora-Guinardó. While there, she came into contact with the CNT, of which she was a member from 1934 onwards. Her activism made her one of one of the union’s leading figures, and in 1936 she was appointed general secretary and treasurer. Barcelona’s occupation by the Francoist army marked the beginning of a wave of arrests, of which Romera was a victim. She was tortured for three days and sentenced to life imprisonment. She died prematurely in the Les Corts Women's Prison, as a result of tuberculosis aggravated by the effects of torture and the unhealthy living conditions that so many women suffered unjustly during the Franco regime.

She was the only woman represented in the Paranymph of the University of Barcelona, where she was also the first Spanish woman to earn a university degree. A doctor in law, abbess, writer and translator, she learned to speak 14 languages. She was born in Barcelona, on Carrer de la Cendra, into a family of Jewish converts with a respectable social and economic position. She studied at the Monges Dominiques, where she soon stood out for her talent. Bright and precocious, she obtained her doctorate in Law from the University of Avignon at just 13 years old, an unprecedented historical milestone. At that time, women rarely had access to any kind of academic knowledge, let alone a university. She was the abbess of the Avignon Dominican Convent, where she devoted herself to writing and translation. Among her contributions, focused on spirituality, her commentaries on the Tratado de la Vida Espiritual, by St Vicent Ferrer, stand out. She was admired by great intellectual figures, such as Lope de Vega, who dedicated verses to her wit and intellectual virtue.

In 1934, she became the first female councillor in the history of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, and she stood out for her activism on behalf of working women’s rights. She arrived in Barcelona with her family in 1908, and in 1925 she began working at the Prat Vermell factories, now known as the Zona Franca. Subsequently she went to work at the Can Pareto textile factory, when she moved to the Santa Eulàlia neighbourhood in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. Later, she worked in Sants and Poblenou in Barcelona, combining her work tasks with her political and social activism for the rights of working women. When the Second Republic was proclaimed in 1931, she joined Esquerra Republicana (ERC – Republican Left of Catalonia). Because of her political militancy, she was imprisoned from 1939 to 1942 in the Barcelona Women's Prison in Les Corts. The initial sentence, of 12 years, was revoked three years later, when a second trial acquitted her of all charges. Until 1948, she had to present herself monthly to the Local Board of Supervised Freedom in L'Hospitalet.

She was the queen of Paral·lel and one of the city’s most iconic celebrities. For four decades, she worked as a singer and dancer in theatres such as El Molino, Apolo, Pompeia and the Victoria. She also performed at the famous Folies-Bergère cabaret in Paris. She arrived in Barcelona with her family at a very young age, and prior to filling theatres, she worked in a toy factory and in an embroidery workshop.

At the age of 17, she began her artistic career as a tango dancer at the Royal Cabaret, a café-concert hall on Av Paral·lel. Shortly afterwards, now under the stage name of “Bella Dorita”, she began to sing couplés (a risqué Spanish theatre style in the late 19th century) at the Sala Apolo and the Pompeia. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she was the city's most emblematic cabaret singer and dancer. Away from the Paral·lel, she collaborated in revues with Mary Sampere, Alady and José Sazatornil. In 1965, tired of fighting against the censorship of the Franco dictatorship, she decided to retire from show business.  In 2001, at the age of one hundred, she was awarded the City of Barcelona Medal for Artistic Merit. Today, a square in front of El Molino is named after her.

Anti-fascist and neighbourhood activist who spent her life fighting against injustice. She lived an itinerant life until settling in Barcelona. Her partner, a communist leader, was in different Francoist prisons. She lived and worked in the various cities where he was imprisoned, allowing her to be near to him, visit him and take him food. In Barcelona, she settled in the shanty town of Camp de la Bota. Her house became a clandestine refuge for members of the Communist Party and for union leaders. From Camp de la Bota, she went to live in Poblenou where she became involved in grassroots social struggles, particularly in supporting the migrant population. She was also a member of the Catalan Association of Ex-Political Prisoners of Francoism (ACEPF).

"Ets més famosa que la Monyos (you’re more famous than Monyos)" is a popular saying that we still hear today. But who was Monyos? A woman who became an icon of the Raval and the Rambles for her clothing and popularity that songs, comedies and plays have been dedicated to. But before that she was Dolors, a young woman from a wealthy family who tried to marry her off to a man who was older than her. When she refused, they kicked her out of the house and disinherited her, and she was even forced to give up her surname. She went to work as a maid in a small mansion on Passeig de Gràcia, owned by a count and countess. She became pregnant by the nobles' son and had a baby girl, but when the child's father died, her in-laws kicked her out of the house and kept the little girl. The separation provoked a mental disorder that she would never recover from. Her story was buried beneath an outlandish identity: that of a woman who walked the Rambles with her hair tied up and a carnation, singing, dancing and reciting poems in exchange for a few coins. Her popularity made her much-loved in the neighbourhood. They say that every morning she went to La Puda, a bar on C/ de Carrera, and ordered a coffee that she never paid for. Her funeral was well-attended, although it remains unknown who bore the expenses.

A pioneer of women's basketball who was also a referee and coach at a time when women and sports were not a common combination. She arrived in Barcelona at the age of 10 and started playing basketball at 13, with the boys and girls in her neighbourhood. Are you imagining a lanky young woman who towered over others? Encarna was just over five feet tall, but her height was inversely proportional to her talent as an athlete. She was famous for her hook shots, which earned her the nickname she would become known by: La niña del gancho, or the hook shot girl. With the Laietà basketball team, she won the first women's basketball championship in Catalonia, in the 1935-36 season. After passing through several clubs and having to combine basketball with other jobs to survive, she signed for FC Barcelona in 1944, where she remained until her retirement in 1953, at the age of 36. She was also the first female basketball coach in Spain, and became a role model for female basketball players in the generations to follow. The documentary La niña del gancho by Raquel Barrera, which premiered in 2016, helped to spread the biography of this pioneering sportswoman.

A basketball legend. She is the basketball player with the most titles and international appearances in the history of the Spanish national team. Over the course of her 25-year career, she has won 22 titles and obtained three European gold medals, three silver medals – including one from the Rio Olympics in 2016 – and six bronze medals.

At the age of 12, she started playing at Club Joventut les Corts. She has played for various clubs, including CBF Universitari, Ros Casares in Valencia and USK in Prague. In 2020, she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in recognition of her basketball career. Today she is the sports director of the Uni Girona and in charge of the Uni Girona and Girona Bàsket youth academies.

The Catalan Basketball Federation is located near the Bac de Roda stop.

An activist for the rights of deaf-blind people who did a lot of awareness-raising work and was also a lecturer and writer. In her books Resultado final (Final Result) and ¡Mucha guerra por dar! (Still Much to Give!), she explained her struggle with neurofibromatosis type II, a degenerative hereditary disease she lived with from the age of 17. She held the position of sub-delegate for Catalonia at the Deaf-Blind Association of Spain, head office near Plaça Espanya, at C/ Sepúlveda, 1. She died prematurely in 2014, as a result of the disease she suffered from.

A designer and teacher at the Bauhaus School who partnered Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, working with him on the German Pavilion design for the 1929 International Exhibition on Montjuïc. That partnership lasted for ten years, leaving highly acclaimed works such as the interior of the Tugendhat House (Czech Republic) and the iconic Barcelona and Brno chairs. Although it is impossible to know which one of them came up with the concept for these creations, the designer’s involvement is undeniable, despite the fact that Van der Rohe's name is more widely heard. She was director of the prestigious Bauhaus school. It is also thanks to her that a collection of 3,000 drawings by the German architect – which she saved from destruction at the height of World War II – are preserved, along with 900 of his designs. During the war, she spent three years in a forced labour camp in precarious living conditions, but following the Allies’ victory she returned to her profession and her design studio. In her final years, she worked as a lecturer in interior design and construction theory at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

Painter, sculptor and illustrator who, since the age of 19, has lived and worked in The Hague in the Netherlands, where she is considered the 21st century’s Rembrandt. The works of this multidisciplinary artist have been exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world. She is the third most sought-after Spanish artist, and the leading female artist. Her name is an abbreviation of the diminutive “Manuelita”. She grew up in Barcelona in very humble surroundings, and at the age of 12 she was adopted by a family. As a young woman, she set up her first art studio in the garage of her home and began to pursue her calling.  She works with fresco painting on large format canvases, where she uses broad strokes to explore the limits of bodies and the female identity. She has also ventured into other disciplines, such as photography and sculpture, and designs the scenery and costumes for operas. In 2011 she received the Roma Culture Award in the category of Painting and Fine Arts from the Spanish Institute of Roma Culture. In 2021, she was named Artist of the Year in the Netherlands.

Painter and illustrator, member of the young generation of Catalan art nouveau artists and an exponent of genre art, who was the first woman to exhibit at Els 4 Gats, in 1898. She was trained in Barcelona and Paris at the beginning of the 20th century and, on her return a year later, she joined the group of Catholic feminists led by Carme Karr and collaborated with the Bonnemaison Women's Popular Library and the Monserdà Women Workers Association. In the field of painting she explored various genres, notably portraits and outdoor scenes, as well as representations of the female universe. She was an exponent of genre painting, in which women's everyday lives were portrayed from a female point of view. She collaborated on magazines, such as Feminal, with multiple illustrations, and she combined this work with the teaching private classes at her workshop in the neighbourhood of Gràcia. She also maintained contact with European artists who were refugees from the First World War that had settled in Catalonia, and she was a member of the Women's Pacifist Committee of Catalonia.

She was a children's author and the first professional female illustrator in Spain. The Llotja was formed, and at just 20 years old, she exhibited with the cartoonist Joan Llaverias. During her formative years as an illustrator, she collaborated with children's publications such as El Patufet and Cu-cut! and presented a solo exhibition of a collection of drawings based on stories by Perrault and Wilde. After the publication of her first own work, Contes del Paradís (Tales of Paradise), in 1920, she moved to Paris, where she continued to work on children's illustration and narrative. During the Spanish Civil War she joined the UGT and collaborated with the Propaganda Commissariat of the Generalitat, which published one of her best known short stories, El més petit de tots (The Smallest of All). After the war she abandoned children's books. She continued to work in illustration, however, with publications that generally featured Barcelona and were interwoven with projects in interior design and scenography.

An anarcho-syndicalist and feminist, Lola Iturbe Arizcuren was a member of the Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias during the Spanish Civil War, and also of the National Confederation of Labour. After Franco’s victory, she fled into exile in France, where she continued to fight fascism in collaboration with the French Resistance. A co-founder of the Mujeres Libres movement, she managed the publication of the magazine of the same name for which she also wrote articles under the pseudonyms Libertad and Kyralinai (1970). Moreover, she wrote for many anarchist journals and newspapers, such as Acción Social Obrera and El libertario, and in 1974 published the essay La mujer en la lucha social y en la Guerra Civil de España (Women in the Social Struggle and in the Spanish Civil War).

Today, near the La Pau and Besòs neighbourhoods, you’ll find a street called Calle Lola Iturbe, a tribute to her memory.

An advocate of economics with a gender perspective, she is an emeritus professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Cornell University (New York), and has been an ILO and UN advisor. She graduated from the University of Barcelona in 1961, and received her PhD from Columbia University in 1975. Her work to consolidate the foundations of economics with a gender perspective linked to development and globalisation has brought her international recognition. She received the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2018. Among her published works is Género, desarrollo y globalización: Una visión desde la economía feminista (Bellaterra, 2018) [Gender, Development and Globalisation: A Vision from the Perspective of Feminist Economics], co-written together with Günseli Berik and Maria S. Floro.

The Zona Franca stop connects to a business park that is one of the city’s key economic drivers.

Social worker and activist campaigning for an egalitarian society, and a former Javerian nun, Luisa Alba Cereceda collaborated with Padre Manel over the years, striving to bring dignity to life in the Roquetes neighbourhood. She was a pioneer of grassroots work on the streets who lived in Sant Adrià del Besòs, took Barcelona metro line 4 each day to get to Via Júlia , and worked her heart out in Roquetes. Widely acclaimed for her neighbourhood work, Cereceda’s memory and legacy are honoured by the local community.

Bookseller and activist, the bookshop she ran on Av. Santa Rosa in Santa Coloma de Gramanet was also a place for conversation and debate.

She lived in the Guinardó district, and in the 1980s moved to the Raval neighbourhood of Santa Coloma de Gramanet, where she opened the bookshop. She became involved in neighbourhood campaigns for the improvement of infrastructure, facilities and public transport. Also, she organised book collections to create the Can Peixauet Public Library on the premises of the local residents’ association. Today the adults’ room of the Can Peixauet Public Library bears her name in tribute to her dedication and her passion for books and culture.

Mar C. Llop was the leading portraitist for transgender people. Photography was an extension of her activism in defence of transgender rights. In the 1980s she studied photography at the Institute of Photographic Studies of Catalonia, and has worked in advertising and publishing. She became particularly interested in portraiture, something that is reflected in projects such as “Construcciones identitàries. Work in progress”. In this work she captured the different bodily processes experienced by transgender people. She was a member of the Generem! trans association, and was involved in the “Trans*forma la Salut” platform in the fight for a new model of health care for transgender people.

Jew, anarchist and photographer of Austrian origin, Margaret Michaelis-Sachs left Berlin in 1933 to settle in Barcelona’s Chinatown, where she would remain until 1937 on account of the rise of Nazism and Hitler’s accession to power. Once in Barcelona, the photographer captured the everyday life of the city in the 1930s, focusing on architecture and urban planning, and was linked to the Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture (GATCPAC). Her images of progressive architecture were published in Catalan magazines such as D’ací i d’Allà, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Nova Iberia. Equipped with her Leica, the photographer caught points of view that had never been captured before on camera, always with her own respectful view of the life and character of the neighbourhood. The young Austrian’s photographic talent is no secret; her work is the essence of modernity, and her mastery of technique and understanding of her surroundings is clear. However, much less widely known is that as well as taking excellent photos, Michaelis was a very good writer, as can be seen in the notes that have been preserved in the Historical Archive of the Architects’ Association of Catalonia. During the Spanish Civil War, and before returning to Poland, Margaret collaborated with the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Propaganda Commission.

Margarida Comas Camps was perhaps the most important Spanish scientist of the first third of the 20th century. As well as a scientist, she was an educator, painter, feminist and anti-fascist activist, and a great advocate of educational innovation. She became one of the first women to earn a degree and a doctorate in natural sciences in Spain. During the Republic, she was a member of the teaching commissions in Catalonia, and in 1933 was secretary of the Regional Council of Secondary Education, where she was the only woman. During the Civil War she left for England, commissioned by the University of Barcelona to carry out anti-fascist propaganda work, and later ended up supervising the education of more than 4,000 Basque refugee children in the United Kingdom. There is a garden in Barcelona that bears the name Margarita Comas i Camps, a memorial and tribute to her. The Mundet Campus of the University of Barcelona, the nerve centre of the educational sciences, includes the Faculty of Pedagogy, the Faculty of Teacher Training and the Faculty of Psychology.

Actor and theatre director Margarida Xirgu i Subirà starred in, and directed, many stage performances, many of them linked to the work of Federico García Lorca, who was a very close friend of hers. She began her professional career at the Teatre Romea at the age of 18. Much of her career was spent in Latin America, where she lived in exile during the Franco dictatorship. Her extensive career as a dramatic actress and director included both classical and contemporary works, from Shakespeare and Lope de Vega to Camús and Alberti, with a particular fondness for the aforementioned Lorca. She founded the School of Dramatic Art in Santiago de Chile, and directed the Comedia Nacional Uruguaya and the Municipal School of Dramatic Art.

The first - and for many years the only - female architect in Catalonia. Margarita Brender Rubira studied architecture in Romania, but in 1962 the Barcelona School of Architecture validated her degree, and she became a member of the College of Architects of Catalonia. In the 1960s, together with architects Barba Corsini and Padrós, she was involved in the construction of the Can Mercader apartment blocks in Badalona.

In her solo projects, she stood out for her defence of integration with nature. Two of these projects were featured in the magazine “Quaderns” in the 1970s; one was a luxury residential complex and sports club that was to be located next to the El Prat de Llobregat golf club. Unfortunately, neither of these two projects were to become a reality.

A prolific journalist and essayist, Margarita Rivière Martí was notable for her defence of feminism during the Transition to Democracy. Together with Teresa Rubio, she was one of the first two female journalists ever to work for El Diario de Barcelona, and in 1978 she was a founding member of El Periódico de Catalunya, where she also headed the cultural section. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Barcelona, and design in Paris, and dealt with subjects such as the phenomenon of fashion as a communicative and cultural system. She was also director of Agencia EFE in Catalonia. and a regular contributor to both La Vanguardia and El País. Her skills as an interviewer are also well known; among her guests were Elia Kazan, La Pasionaria, Yoko Ono, the Dalai Lama, Jordi Pujol and Pedro Almodóvar. In 1977, she co-wrote the first manual on contraceptives to be published in Spain, together with gynaecologist Santiago Dexeus. At that time, the sale and administration of contraceptives was permitted, but advertising them was forbidden by the penal code.

Mari Pepa Colomer was the first Catalan woman to earn her pilot’s licence and is famous for managing to land a Zeppelin at the Barcelona aerodrome, where the airport is now located. It was here that she had her first taste of aviation in 1930, and where she flew numerous test flights. In 1932 she joined the Unió de Pilots Aviadors de Catalunya, which was established in that same year, and achieved official flight instructor certification. She subsequently worked as a teacher at the Barcelona Flight School and at the Cooperativa de Treball Aeri, which she and her fellow pilots co-founded. At the Escola d’Aviadors Militars military aviation school she coincided with Dolors Vives Rodons, another female aviation pioneer who she worked with during the Civil War, controlling enemy ships and recording aircraft movements in Barcelona and Valencia until the El Prat aerodrome was bombed. After helping thousands of Republican exiles to cross the Spanish-French border, she herself went into exile in England at the end of the war. She never flew again.

A local grassroots activist, Maria Àngels Rivas Ureña arrived in Barcelona in the 1960s with her two children after living in Morocco, Tangiers and Switzerland. At first they lived in a boarding house in Plaça Reial, and later settled in the La Guineueta neighbourhood. She had only been there for a short time when together with other residents, she demanded the installation of traffic lights on Pg. Valldaura to improve road safety. Years later she joined the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, where she worked unstintingly to improve the social reality of the neighbourhood: getting it connected to the telephone network, and protesting against the expropriation of homes to make way for the construction of what is today the Ronda de Dalt ring road. The protests led to the modification of the plans for the ring road. As a result of her leadership skills, she became chair of the La Guineueta residents’ association and was deeply involved in the struggles of the new Canyelles neighbourhood, which was built in the 1970s. She was the first chair of the Canyelles residents’ association.

Founder of the Blenedai nursery school in the Camp de la Bota shanty town. In the 1980s, Maria Àngels Rosell Simplicio was councillor for social services at Sant Adrià del Besòs Town Council, where she was the driving force behind the founding of the Casal de la Dona, one of the first women’s centres in Catalonia. After leaving the council, she became involved in improving the social reality of the La Mina neighbourhood, where she founded the La Mina Women’s Association “Adrianes”, with the aim of working to transform the neighbourhood with the participation of local women. She also actively collaborated on other community initiatives. In recognition of her work in the community, in 2010 she received the President Macià Medal from the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Maria Antònia Canals i Tolosa is the key point of reference in the teaching of mathematics in early childhood education. She was a mathematician, educator and the co-founder of the Rosa Sensat Teachers’ Association. Canals studied to be a teacher at the Escola Normal de Tarragona i Ciències Exactes at the University of Barcelona. Throughout her career, she wanted to bring advanced educational approaches to the city’s peripheral neighbourhoods. She spearheaded the creation of the Ton i Guida school in Les Roquetes, where she was principal from the beginning in 1962 until 1980. During the 1960s and 1970s, the school was a trailblazer due to the innovative methodologies used. The pupils went on excursions and studied subjects such as art and music, and could express themselves in Catalan. In the 1980s, the school became part of the state school network and merged with the Pla de Fornells school to become what is now CEIP Antaviana. In recognition of its adoption of new educational approaches, it was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2006.

A benchmark intellectual in the late Franco regime, she was a writer, educator and politician. The author of the well-known novel Betúlia, she also made a noteworthy contribution to the world of theatre with plays like Tu i l’hipòcrita [You and the Hypocrite]. A versatile writer who produced an extensive body of work, she wrote everything from novels, short stories, children’s literature and plays to essays, diaries and scripts for television and radio. She was deeply committed to feminism, as reflected in a significant part of her writing, for example in the 1969 work Feliçment jo soc una dona [Fortunately I Am a Woman]. Since 1987, Barcelona City Council has presented the 8 March Award - Maria Aurèlia Capmany to initiatives and projects whose aim is to defend and advance the rights of women, with a different theme each year. The Urgell stop is near the Coliseum. Located in its dome, the Adrià Gual Drama School was founded in 1960, inspired by Maria Aurèlia Capmany and Ricard Salvat.

A pianist of international renown, Maria Canals performed in all the major European capitals. Her career as a professional performer began in 1940, and her appearances at the Palau de la Música Catalana following her first solo recital two years later were particularly noteworthy. She was the driving force behind the Ars Nova Music Academy and the Maria Canals Competition to promote musical education, and created the Maria Canals International Music Competition with the aim of nurturing the talent of the new generations. The people of Barcelona are well aware of the “open pianos” to be found in public spaces around the city during the competition. In 1990, the Generalitat de Catalunya awarded her the Creu de Sant Jordi. The Passeig de Gràcia stop is close to the Academia de Música Ars Nova, located at Gran Vía de les Corts Catalanes, 654.

A renowned social anthropologist, she was also a writer and feminist activist, author of the work Les altres dones: la construcció de l’exclusió social [Other Women: the Construction of Social Exclusion]. She arrived in Barcelona in 1976 as an exile from the Videla dictatorship in Argentina, and taught at the Faculty of Geography and History at the University of Barcelona between 1977 and 2001. Her major contributions to anthropology focus on migratory movements and gender studies. Her career achievements were recognised when the Generalitat de Catalunya awarded her the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2010. Hospitalet as a whole is one of the urban areas that has seen the arrival of the highest percentage of people from other continents in recent waves of migration.

The Constitution also has its mothers, and Maria Dolors Calvet i Puig is one of them, along with the 27 other women involved in the constituent process of the Transition to Democracy in Spain. She was also the only female parliamentarian to participate in the drafting of the 1979 Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, and was a member of the first legislature of the Catalan Parliament. In the early 1970s, she moved to Hospitalet de Llobregat where she took part in the organisation of the local committee of the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia). As well as being a politician, she holds a degree in information science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and a PhD from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). She has also worked as a lecturer in town and country planning in the Department of Construction Engineering at the UPC, and is a member of the Group for Equal Opportunities in Architecture, Science and Technology (GIOPACT), which defends equality and the rights of women scientists. Among other institutions, she collaborates with the Friends of the United Nations association, which organised International Women’s Year in 1975. In 2015, she received the Medal of Honour from the Catalan Parliament.

The history of Les Roquetes cannot be understood without the activism of Maria Lluïsa Serralta, and the work she did to preserve the collective memory and heritage of the community. In 1983, she created the Roquetes - Nou Barris Historical Archive.

One of her campaigns was focused on the restoration of Torre Baró castle, a historical and emblematic symbol of Nou Barris. She also championed the memory of the washhouse women of the Cases del Governador. Built in 1953, as well as being a place for washing clothes, these were also a space of solidarity and a meeting place for women. Today, a plaque and a lectern remind us where these washhouses were located. Serralta was the chair of the Verdum residents’ association, which she used as a platform for channelling the neighbourhood’s struggles and demands.

During the 1970s, she was the driving force behind the opening of the Freire School for Adults located on Via Favencia, which promoted literacy and emancipation for local women.

Journalist, writer and translator, in 1921 María Luz Morales Godoy was editor of the women’s magazine El hogar y la Moda, and two years later began to write for La Vanguardia and other media outlets. In 1926, she won the Barcelona Chamber of Books prize in recognition of the journalistic work she had done for her article Elogio del libro (In Praise of Books). She became an expert on theatre and film, and worked as a critic. In 1940, she was reported for having been editor of La Vanguardia, and was imprisoned in the convent on the Sarrià road, as well as being barred from continuing to work as a journalist. In 1949, she returned to journalism never to give it up again, and until the very end of her life was a contributor to the Diari de Barcelona. For a time she was head of the Universitas encyclopaedia at Editorial Salvat (Mallorca, 47), near the Rocafort stop.

Actress, theatre director, announcer and voice-over artist, Maria Matilde Almendros i Carcasona was instrumental in the use of Catalan on the air during the post-war period and the Spanish Transition to Democracy. In 1976 she joined Radio 4, where she contributed to La veu de la sardana (The Voice of the Sardana) and Lliçons de català (Lessons in Catalan), as well as other programmes. A member of the Teatre Romea company, she directed plays such as La reina [The Queen], an adaptation of the dramatic poem by Josep Maria de Sagarra, and played leading roles in several plays, such as Terra Baixa (1953). In 1969 she received the Ondas Prize, and in 1990 the Generalitat de Catalunya awarded her the Creu de Sant Jordi. Her stop is to be found near the first radio station in Spain, which was located at Tibidabo in 1926.

An anti-Franco activist, Maria Salvo i Iborra spent 16 years in Les Corts women’s prison. In 1941, she was arrested for being the propaganda secretary for the Barcelona branch of the Unified Socialist Youth of Catalonia. She was sentenced to 30 years for clandestine activities. When democracy returned, she became head of the Catalan Association of Political Prisoners. In 1997, she was involved in the creation of the Les Dones del 36 association, together with Josefina Piquet, “the girl of ’36” and other women survivors of the Civil War. In that same year, the association received the Maria Aurèlia Capmany award from Barcelona City Council. In 2004, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. A year later, she received the Creu de Sant Jordi.

In her final years, she supported the platform calling for a monument to the memory of the Les Corts women’s prison to be erected.

For many years, she lived near Plaça de Lesseps.

“A l’atzar agraeixo tres dons: haver nascut dona, de classe baixa i nació oprimida. I el tèrbol atzur de ser tres voltes rebel.” [I am grateful to fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, from the working class and from an oppressed nation. And the clouded azure of being a rebel three times over]. These famous lines define this extraordinarily talented poet, translator and storyteller. They form part of the poem Divisa and appear in Cau de llunes, which was published in 1976 with a prologue by Joan Brossa and won the Carles Riba Prize. She came to Barcelona in 1969 to study at the University of Barcelona, where she earned a degree in classical philosophy. Her prolific work dealt with issues that were absent from Catalan literature, such as love between women, something that was unheard of in Catalan literature until the publication of her collection of poems Terra de Mai [Neverland]. She won various prizes, such as the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes award (1996) for her novel La Passió segona Renée Vivien [Passion according to Renée Vivien]. Before her premature death at the age of 45, Barcelona City Council presented her with the city’s Medal of Honour. The Vilapicina stop is close to the Turó de la Peira neighbourhood, where her daughter Heura was born.

Taken by Juan Guzmán, the photograph of Marina Ginestà Coloma standing on the roof of the Hotel Colón in Barcelona, dressed as a soldier of the militia and staring defiantly into the camera with a rifle slung over her shoulder, is one of the most iconic portraits from the Civil War. The caption at the foot of the image, written for propaganda purposes, reads: “Barcelona, 21 July 1936. Miliciana Marina Jinesta, member of the Communist Youth, poses on the rooftop of the Hotel Colón, where a militia recruitment office has been set up”. During the war she worked as a journalist and translator, but with Franco’s victory ended up being incarcerated in a concentration camp. Released a couple of months later, she fled to France, from where she sailed to the Dominican Republic where she stayed until 1946, when she was once again forced into exile as a result of the persecution of Spanish republicans led by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. She returned to Barcelona when democracy was restored, and in 1976 published two award-winning novels: Els antípodes [The Antipodes] which won the Fastenrath prize at the Barcelona Floral Games in 1977, and En vindran d’altres [Others Will Come) winner of the Salvador Seguñi award at the Floral Games for the Catalan Language in exile.

A workers’ leader and neighbourhood activist, in 1976 Maruja Ruiz Martos led a people’s lock-in at the church of Sant Andreu de Palomar when her husband was dismissed from the Motor Ibérica company together with 1,800 other workers, after more than a month of strike action. The daughter of a family that suffered repression under the Franco regime, she arrived in Barcelona with her mother in 1949 and joined the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia). Known as ’La Maruja of Nou Barris’, in 2011 she refused to accept the Barcelona Medal of Honour from the then mayor, Xavier Trias, “because of the cuts made to public services”. Along with other neighbourhood activists, she has fought for years to prevent construction on the site where the Casal de la Prosperitat now stands. The church of Sant Andreu is near the Fabra i Puig metro stop.

Journalist, writer and war correspondent, Maruja Torres is a key witness of events and a representative of a whole generation of critical thinking. Self-taught, her first contact with the media was in 1963, as secretary and editor of the daily paper La Prensa. In the 1960s she worked for Garbo magazine, and also published articles in Fotogramas, El País and La Calle. In the early 1980s, she moved to Madrid and joined the editorial staff of El País, which at that time was under the direction of Rosa Montero. As a war correspondent during the American invasion of Panama in 1989, she witnessed the murder of photographer Juantxu Rodríguez, who was shot dead by the US army. She lived in Beirut for several years, covering the conflict in Lebanon, before finally returning to Barcelona, where she combined publishing books and writing articles for the press. In 2013 she resigned as opinion editor at El País, and since then has been a contributor to El Diario. She won the Premio Planeta in 2000 for her novel While We Live, and also the Premio Nadal in 2009 for Wait for Me in Heaven.

Actress, singer and vedette, Mary Santpere managed to enter the field of comedy, which was monopolised by men. She became famous as the “Queen of the Paral·lel” because of her prominent presence at the theatres on Barcelona’s Av. Paral·lel. She worked on both the small and the big screen and was an outstanding theatrical performer. In 1938 she made her début as a film actress with Paco Martínez Soria, who she also worked with on other occasions. Shortly afterwards, she met director and scriptwriter Ignasi Ferrés Iquino (better known as Ignacio F. Iquino), who she would collaborate with for over four decades. In the 1950s she got her break as a musical theatre actor, but her career as a comic actor would continue until the end of her life. Versatile and charismatic, the roles she played, such as that of the countess in Luis García Berlanga’s National Heritage (1981), were unforgettable. In 1959 she received the Círculo de Bellas Artes Gold Medal, and in 1988 the Generalitat de Catalunya awarded her the Premi d’Honor de la Generalitat de Catalunya.

La Colometa lives on in the memory of any reader who is familiar with In Diamond Square, a universally acclaimed work by one of Barcelona’s most international writers, Mercè Rodoreda, who was born into a well-educated and bohemian family. She grew up in C. Pàdua, in the Sant Gervasi de Cassoles neighbourhood, halfway between the boundless worlds of literature and the limited horizons of a well brought-up young girl at the beginning of the 20th century. The pen was her key to an escape from the narrow confines of this reality, and in 1932 she published her first novel, Am I an Honoured Woman? During the years that followed, she wrote short stories, newspaper articles and novels, including Aloma (1938). At the end of the Civil War, she trod the path to exile in France with other intellectuals, not returning until 1972. She lived in Paris, Geneva and Vienna, where she continued to publish: Twenty-two Stories (1958), In Diamond Square (1962), Camellia Street (1966) and Garden by the Sea (1967). At the end of the 1960s her works started to be translated, her fame grew, and was consolidated during the 1970s. In 1974 she published A Broken Mirror, and the years that followed saw the publication of her complete works and screen adaptations of Aloma and In Diamond Square.

Councillor at Barcelona City Council for three consecutive terms, Mercè Sala i Schnorkowski was also president of TMB, and first deputy mayor for urban planning and public works. An economics graduate, she worked at the Banc Industrial de Catalunya for nine years. Her first term of office coincided with the first democratic municipal elections in 1979. In 1991, she became the first woman to become president of RENFE (the Spanish National Rail Network), where she was the driving force behind the commissioning of Spain’s first high-speed rail line (AVE). The Sants metro stop connects to the most important RENFE station in the city.

Data analyst, feminist and anti-racist activist. Míriam Hatibi focuses on combating Islamophobia, defending the rights of Muslim women and calling for a more pluralistic vision of society. She has been spokesperson for the Ibn Battuta Foundation, an organisation that promotes socio-cultural and scientific exchange with Morocco, and is a strong advocate of the power of communication in achieving social change.

In 2015, she graduated in International Business and Economics from Pompeu Fabra University, and later obtained a Master’s degree in Internationalisation from the University of Barcelona. She takes part in radio and television programmes, such as Terrícoles on Betevé, and is currently a communications consultant at the Sibilare company.

Employment lawyer and anti-Franco activist, Montserrat Avilés i Vila was a leading figure in the defence of workers’ rights. From the moment she and her husband opened their office in 1960, she dealt with many of the labour and trade union conflicts that took place during the final years of the Franco regime and the beginning of the Transition to Democracy. She acted as mediator in labour disputes with companies such as SEAT, Harry Walker and Maquinista Terrestre i Marítima. In the 1960s, she was a member of the board of the Barcelona Bar Association, seeking to democratise an institution that lacked internal transparency and independence.

Politically, she was active in the Popular Liberation Front and the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. In 1973, she was one of the 113 people arrested at the meeting of the anti-Franco Assembly of Catalonia held in the church of Santa Maria Mitjancera, in C. Entença. She was arrested for her opposition to the dictatorship and spent three months in La Modelo prison.

The employment law firm was open until 2013, when the documentary collection was donated to the Historical Archive of the Cipriano García Foundation.

An internationally acclaimed operatic soprano with a repertoire of over a hundred works, Montserrat Caballé was one of the most important voices in opera at the end of the 20th century. A bel canto specialist with impeccable vocal technique, she made her début in 1956 in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In that same year she played Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème, and achieved huge international success. She performed in auditoriums and theatres all over the world, from Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu to Carnegie Hall in New York to La Scala in Milan. Among the many honours she received were the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts (1973) and the National Music Prize (1988). Her performance of Barcelona with Freddie Mercury at the opening ceremony of the 1992 Olympic Games was a major international success, and considered an iconic performance by the people of Barcelona.

Actress and voice-over artist, Montserrat Carulla i Ventura performed in more than 80 plays over the course of her career, as well as working in film, and was a leading figure in the imaginary of the small-screen in Catalonia, entertaining audiences almost without pause from 1976 to 2017. She grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Sant Gervasi, but during the Civil War she and her two brothers were moved to Sant Feliu de Codines. At the end of the war, her father tried to flee into exile in France because of his links with the Republican side, but was held for over a year in the Argelès concentration camp. The precariousness of the post-war period marked her early years. From an early age she revealed a vocation for the arts, and soon began to work in radio. She trained at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, and began her professional career as an actor in the 1960s with roles in plays such as Josep Maria de Segarra’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. From then on, her career went from strength to strength, and for four decades she was one of the best-known faces on the Catalan theatre scene. She has received several awards, such as the Gold Medal from the Generalitat de Catalunya. As a child she lived in Baix Guinardó, on Passeig d’Ordi, where she remembered playing as a child.

Montserrat Roig was one of the most important voices in contemporary Catalan literature, and the novelist of the viscera of classical Barcelona. 

Writer, journalist and feminist, the city of Barcelona, and more specifically the Eixample, provided the principal setting for the narratives of sensational novels such as “El temps de les cireres” (The Time of Cherries), “La veu melodiosa” [The Melodious Voice] and “L’Hora Violeta” [The Violet Hour]. Thanks to the excellent work of investigative journalism she did with “Els catalans als camps nazis”, the historical memory of many of those who were repressed by Nazism was preserved. One of her role models was Mercè Rodoreda, whom she regarded as her mentor.

Roig studied philosophy and the arts at the University of Barcelona, gaining a PhD.

Her anti-fascist stance and political commitment led her to take part in the “Caputxinada” of 1966. In the 1970s, she was a member of the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) and was the driving force behind the Assemblea Permanent d’Intellectuals Catalans, after taking part in the lock-in organised by intellectuals at the Abbey of Montserrat in protest against the Burgos trials. In the 1980s she became an established writer, and during those years worked with different newspapers and also in television and radio. She was awarded several literary prizes, such as the Premi Nacional de Literatura Catalana essay award and the Serra d’Or Critics Prize.

A pioneering long-distance swimmer, Montserrat Tresserras i Dou was the first person in the world to cross the English Channel in both directions, and the first woman from Spain to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in 1957. A typist by profession, as a teenager she discovered the sea and began her career as a swimmer at the age of 24. She swam from the port of Barcelona to various Catalan ports, and soon her goals grew more ambitious. Her first feat, that of swimming from the Iberian Peninsula to the coast of Africa in just over five hours, made front-page news at a time when sporting achievements by women were rare, due to inequality and restricted access. Just one year later, she swam the Channel, and her fame grew. Finally, in 1961, she achieved the most important milestone in her career, when she swam the English Channel in the opposite direction, from England to France. Her success established her as one of the most important long-distance swimmers of the 20th century, and a pioneer in women’s sport.

Like many other Afghan women, Nadia Ghulam’s life is marked by the consequences of war and the Taliban regime.

Writer and human rights activist, she was seriously injured by a bomb blast during the Afghan Civil War in 1991, subsequently spending six months in hospital and undergoing 14 surgical operations. To circumvent the rigid prohibitions imposed by the Taliban and to help her family, for ten years she pretended to be her brother, who had died during the war. She later told the story of this experience in her 2010 novel “El secret del meu turbant” [The Secret of my Turban], which won her the Prudenci Bertrana prize for fiction.

Thanks to support from the Association for Human Rights in Afghanistan, she arrived in Badalona in 2006, where she currently lives with her adoptive family.

Anti-Franco activist. At the age of 22, Neus Bouzá Gil was condemned to death and executed by firing squad on 26 May 1939 in Camp de la Bota, along with 11 other women in the Les Corts women’s prison.

She lived in Poblenou and worked in the textile factory in C. Ali-Bei. A CNT militant, she was involved in the struggle for civil liberties and the rights of the working class. During the Civil War, she was a member of the rearguard workers’ militias stationed at the Castle of the Four Towers in the Camp de la Bota neighbourhood. After the war, she was arrested and accused of having been involved in the execution of right wing individuals, which she categorically denied.

The Selva de Mar stop is near the Castle of the Four Towers, where Bouzá was a member of the militia. In front of the Fòrum building stands a memorial in remembrance of those who faced the firing squad in Camp de la Bota.

Nurse, anti-fascist and survivor of the Ravensbrück Nazi concentration camp. After graduating in nursing in 1937, Neus Català moved to Barcelona to support the government of the Republic. In 1939, she crossed the border with 182 children from the Premià de Dalt orphanage.

In 1943, the Nazis arrested and imprisoned her in Limoges, and deported her to Ravensbrück in Germany the following year. At the camp she was part of the so-called “comando de les gandules” (“lazy brigade”), a group of women who sabotaged arms manufacture at a factory in Holleischen. They succeeded in rendering some ten million bullets unusable and ruined numerous weapons. Once liberated, in 1945 she returned to France, where she continued her anti-Francoist struggle and her militancy in Comunistes de Catalunya. She chaired the Amical de Ravensbrück association, which was created in 2005, and was honoured with various awards such as the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2005) and the Gold Medal for Civic Merit from Barcelona City Council (2014).

Since her professional stage début in Euripides’ Medea in 1954, Núria Espert has become one of the most widely acclaimed, prolific and award-winning Catalan actors of the second half of the 20th century. Until the age of 19 she lived in the Santa Eulàlia neighbourhood, in C. Buenos Aires, and began to take part in amateur stage productions at the age of 16, until she won her first professional role. While the theatre is her first love, she has also worked in stage direction and opera, on works such as Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. She has appeared in dozens of successful theatre productions, from classics such as José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio and Lope de Vega’s El caballero de Olmedo (The Knight from Olmedo) to contemporary works such as The Witches of Salem by Arthur Miller, and Federico García Lorca’s Yerma. Among the numerous awards she has received are the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts, the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts, several Silver Fotogramas, the Butaca Award, the Ondas Award, the Valle Inclán Theatre Award and the Pepe Isbert National Theatre Award.

Núria Feliu i Mestres was, and always will be, the great lady of Sants. A singer and actor, she was a leading figure in the Nova Cançó and a pioneer in translating country and jazz songs into Catalan, accompanied by the pianist Tete Montoliu. As a child, she was already performing at the Sant Vicenç de Paül School in Hostafrancs, and later at the Quadre Escènic de l’Orfeó Canigó. She began her artistic career as a theatre actor until making her début as a singer in 1965. Over the course of her career, she recorded some 50 albums and published more than 400 songs. She popularised Catalan folk songs, boleros and cuplés, and brought jazz and country music to the public.

Her roots in the Sants neighbourhood ran deep throughout her life, so much so that she paid for a giant to be created in her own image.

In recognition of her long career she received a number of distinctions, such as the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1985.

Teacher, social activist and one of the first female councillors on Barcelona City Council. From a young age, Núria Gispert i Feliu was involved with the scout movement, Christian militancy and the Moviment Associatiu de Sant Andreu. Her activities as an activist began with volunteering at a school in the Can Tunis neighbourhood.

She was a member of the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) and the PSC (Socialist Party of Catalonia), and between 1979 and 1995 was a member of Barcelona City Council. She later became director of Caritas Barcelona, and subsequently president of Caritas Spain. In recognition of her social and political career, in 2002 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi, and in 2013 the Medalla d’Honor del Parlament. In 2014, she gave the opening speech at the La Mercè festivities.

Núria Pompeia was a cartoonist, journalist and graphic artist. Her cartoons were published in Diari de Barcelona, Oriflama Vindicación Feminista and Charlie Hebdo, and her work was characterised by a critical and defiant tone towards the bourgeoisie and male chauvinism. She illustrated posters and magazines for activities linked to the feminist movement, and wrote cultural articles for La Vanguardia.

Born in the Eixample district, she spent most of her life in Sarrià. Her first graphic work, Maternasis, was published in 1967, and during the 1970s her cartoons appeared in Oriflama. Among other distinctions, she received the Medalla d’Or de Barcelona in 2000, and the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2007.

Sociocultural activist, anti-Francoist and feminist, Palmira Domènech Ayats was one of the first social educators in Catalonia. During the latter years of the Franco regime, she became actively involved in opposing the dictatorship, to the point of being in charge of the PSUC’s (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) propaganda apparatus between 1963 and 1970. Later, she was noted for her activism in El Prat de Llobregat, where, from 1969 to 1977, she was a social worker at the Centro de esparcimiento de la Cooperativa Obrera de Viviendas, “La Cope”. In the final years of her life, she was still active on a social level as a member of the League for Secularism, the Catalunya-Lebanon association, and the “iaioflautas”of Barcelona. In 2019, the Palmira Domènech Civic Centre, known as “La Palmira”, was opened near the El Prat metro station.

Graphic designer and art director. Pati Núñez was the first woman to win a National Design Award in 2007.

She studied graphic design at the EINA school. In 1995 she opened a studio in the Gràcia district, where she developed corporate image, product and communication projects for major companies. In 2013, the trade publication Revista Graffica recognised her as one of the ten most outstanding art directors in Spain.  Among the distinctions she has received in recognition of her career is the National Culture Award (2006) from the Generalitat de Catalunya.

An educator and activist, Pepita Casanellas taught at Can Tunis and El Polvorí, where she worked to promote social cohesion. In 1935, the parish of Nostra Senyora del Port called on her to teach at the parish school in the Port district, now known as Zona Franca. Later, as a teacher of the children of the Can Tunis and El Polvorí shanty towns, she introduced learning that transcended the contents of the syllabus, including theatre, music and other areas of experiential knowledge. She energised the neighbourhood, and encouraged integration and social cohesion. Moreover, she also became involved in the Educational Renewal Movement and joined the Col·lectiu d’Escoles per l’Escola Pública Catalana. In 2006, Barcelona City Council awarded her the city’s Medal of Honour for her dedication to education.

Photographer specialising in portraiture and street reportage. Pilar Aymerich Puig’s images capture the social and political reality of the late Franco era, and document public protest during the Transition to Democracy. Her articles were published in Serra d’Or, Destino, El País, Fotogramas and other publications, and she collaborated on a number of television programmes.

Before becoming interested in photography, she studied theatre direction at the Adrià Gual school of dramatic art, and did further training in London. It was in the UK capital that she took her first steps in the world of photography.

The Museum of the History of Catalonia has dedicated several exhibitions to her, including 1975-1979. Memòria d’un temps [1975-1979. Memories of a Time] in 2004, and Resistents. La cultura com a defensa [Resistance. Culture as Defence] in 2008. She has received numerous distinctions, such as the Creu de Sant Jordi (2005), the Margarita Rivière prize from the College of Journalists and the National Photography Prize (2021).

Trade unionist, neighbourhood activist and feminist, in 1966 Pura Fernández García set up the La Bomba Housing Cooperative to demand decent housing in Bellvitge. Fernández and her family had moved from Jaén to the shanty town of La Bomba a few years earlier, in 1948.  Later, she began her struggle against the Franco regime, joined the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) and took part in the founding of the Comissions Obreres de Catalunya trade union in 1964. That same year, she was the driving force behind the Democratic Women’s Movement. Four years later, in 1968, she was arrested during the May Day celebrations, and spent three months in the Trinitat Nova women’s prison.

Activist and feminist, Ramona Fossas i Puig played a leading role in local struggles in Guinardó to bring dignity to the neighbourhood. She collaborated tirelessly on initiatives aimed at promoting the emancipation of women and universal access to education. She was linked to the Centre de Cultura Popular Montserrat and the Escola d’Adults, and was also credited with promoting changes to the nomenclature. Today, in memory of her contribution to the neighbourhood, a square is named after her, between the streets of Teodor Llorente, Escornalbou, Renaixença and Villar.

Nurse and midwife. At the age of 14, Ramona Vía and Pros began to keep a diary where she described her experiences as a nurse during the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period. The diary was published years later, in 1966, entitled Nit de Reis: Diari d’una infermera de 14 anys. [Twelfth Night: Diary of a 14-year-old Nurse]. She spent most of her life in El Prat de Llobregat where she worked as a midwife for 30 years. In the 1970s, she published the journal Com neixen els catalans [How Catalans are Born], in which she talked about her experience from the first time she attended her a birth in 1945 up until 1972. As a writer, she collaborated on publications such as Vida Nova, Serra d’Or, En Patufet and Cavall Fort.

Today the primary care centre, located near Les Moreres station, bears her name.

Singer, cabaret performer and actor. Raquel Meller popularised songs like La Violetera and El Relicario. She made her début at the Teatre Arnau in 1911, and by the 1920s was already performing on the famous stages of Paris, New York and Los Angeles. She also starred in silent films such as Violetas Imperiales (1923) and Carmen (1926). During the 1930s she lived in France, where she was extremely well-known. Later, after the Civil War she returned to Barcelona, where she revived the play La Violetera.

The Hostafrancs metro stop is near Barcelona’s theatre land, Av. Paral·lel.

Writer, publisher and activist She is an expert in immigration and gender and has worked to defend the rights of women, ethnic minorities and migrants.

She arrived in Spain in the 1960s to further her education and moved to Barcelona, where she studied Early Years Education and specialised in Gender and Development at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

She has led different associational movements since the 1980s and has been a member of organisations like E'Waiso Ipola and the Barcelona Immigrant Women's Network.

In 1995, she founded the Mey publishing house, a reference point for literature from Equatorial Guinea. She is currently the secretary of the E’Waiso Ipola association and a promoter of the federation of African women’s associations of Spain.

Els Encants is one of the key meeting points for the sub-Saharan migrant population in the city.

Educator and activist for the rights of deaf people. She stands out for her linguistic research into Catalan sign language and for opening the Catalan Sign Language Education Centre (LLESIG). She has close ties with the associational movement and organisations like the Catalan Federation for the Deaf (FESOCA) and the Association of Deaf Persons of Sabadell. In 2022,  she received the award for Promoting Catalan Sign Language from the government of Catalonia in recognition of her efforts.

The FESOCA headquarters is located in the La Verneda i La Pau neighbourhood.

Journalist and international correspondent. She is one of the most long-standing correspondents on television, where she has worked for 37 years, travelling to more than 160 countries.

She has a Law degree from the University of Barcelona and a Journalism degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She began at the Miramar studios of Ràdio Televisió Espanyola (RTVE) in the 1970s.

In 1983, she requested a leave of absence from RTVE to join the founding team of TV3, where she is the programme director. When she rejoined RTVE in 1984, she accepted the first job as New York correspondent. She later served as a correspondent in Moscow, Buenos Aires, Rome, Vienna, Hong Kong and Beijing. She sent her last reports as a correspondent from the Philippines.

She has received numerous distinctions like the Onda prize for best professional in 2001, the José Couso Freedom of the Press Award and the Journalism Career award in 2016 from the Catalan Women Journalists’ Association. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary PhD from Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona. 

Sardà was one of the country's leading actresses both onstage and onscreen. A theatre actress, announcer and theatre director, she was extraordinarily versatile in all settings. She was capable of making audiences laugh out loud or cry their hearts out. Engaging, tender, acerbic and disagreeable... She won two Goyas as the best supporting actress for ‘¿Por qué lo llaman amor cuando quieren decir sexo?’ (1994) and ‘Sinvergüenza’ (2002). She was also awarded the Golden Medal from the Spanish Film Academy in 2010, the Feroz Honorary Award in 2016 for her career and the Gaudí Lifetime Achievement Award.

She started out performing at the amateur theatre in the neighbourhood of Horta.  She made her professional debut in 1962 with the play ‘Cena de matrimonios’ at the Teatre Guimerà, and she began to exploit her comical side with the Companyia Catalana de Vodevil founded by Elena Jordi in 1914.  She has performed in plays directed by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet and Lluís Pascual, among others. In the cinema, she performed in more than 50 films and worked with Ventura Pons, Luís García Berlanga, Iciar Bollaín and Pedro Almodóvar.

An intensive-care doctor and anaesthesiologist, she was the first woman medical director of the Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge. She started her professional association with the hospital in 1978, when she began working there as an anaesthesiologist and intensive-care doctor. At first she worked as an anaesthesiologist and intensive-care doctor. She helped to promote the creation of a post-operative recovery room, a cutting-edge service that was launched in 1986. She then earned her doctorate and was named head of section. In 1991 she was offered a post on the managerial team, which she accepted while earning a Master's in the Economics of Health and Healthcare Management. In addition to directing the Barcelona hospital, she has also held important managerial positions at the Hospital Universitari Joan XXIII in Tarragona.

A writer and translator, she founded the La Gaya Ciencia and Bausán publishing houses and served as the general manager of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library of Spain). As a young girl, she lived in exile in France during the Spanish Civil War. She returned to Barcelona and was a student at a boarding school run by Dominican nuns in the neighbourhood of Horta. She earned a degree in Philosophy and Humanities from the University of Barcelona and began to work for the publishing house in 1964. Five years later she founded the La Gaya Ciencia publishing house, which focuses on architecture, poetry, literature and politics, and Bausán, which publishes children’s literature. In 1983, she began to work as a translator for the UN and moved to Geneva, the city after which she named her first book, which was published in 1987. Four years later, she published Memorias de Almantor, her first novel, which examines a woman's path to maturity. A prolific author, she also published Azul, which won the 1994 Nadal award, and La canción de Dorotea, which garnered her the 2001 Planeta award. UN translator (1983-94) and general manager of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library of Spain) (2003-2007). She was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George's Cross) from the government of Catalonia in 2005.

A teacher and educationalist who was a leading figure in educational modernisation in Catalonia during the first third of the twentieth century. Thanks to her, a generation of teachers emerged during the Second Republic who followed the path that opened up to new forms of pedagogy.

She completed her education degree in Madrid, where she was in touch with the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. There, her interest in learning about pedagogical methods outside Spain grew. She travelled to Belgium, Switzerland and Germany to further her education and knowledge.

When she returned to Barcelona, she was the driving force behind the creation of the Escola del Bosc (Forest School) on Montjuïc in 1914 to educate children in nature. All the classes were held outdoors. For two decades, she applied innovative teaching methods there. She also worked with the Institute of Culture and Popular Library for Women, created in 1909 by Francesca Bonnemaison.

During the Second Republic, she directed the Milà i Fontanals school group, but when Francoism took hold, she was purged and banned from teaching.

In 1965, she created the Rosa Sensat association as an educational renewal movement, which later became a teachers’ organisation with the educationalist Marta Mata at the helm.

Montjuïc mountain, where the Escola del Bosc was founded, is next to the L10 south stop at Foc.

Anna, Teresa and Helena, the triplets dressed in green, blue and pink who go on adventures and infuriate the Bruixa Avorrida (Boring Witch), have touched the lives of a whole generation of children. Their creator is an illustrator and writer who is internationally renowned for her career in children's and young adult literature. After studying Fine Arts at Barcelona’s Massana School, she started her professional career as a multidisciplinary artist, but in the 1980s she moved into publishing children’s and young adult literature. Les Tres bessones came into being in 1990 in collaboration with the Cromosoma production company. The show, based on the iconic triplets, has been broadcast in150 countries and has become an audiovisual product that gives visibility to girls as the main characters in stories who are determined, brave and ready to overcome all the challenges that come their way. The numerous awards it has received include the Medal of Honour of the Catalan Parliament. The Vallcarca stop is near Passeig de la Mare de Déu del Coll, 40, the former location of the Balet i Blay studios, where the first colour animated film in all of Europe was produced: El cigronet valent.

A teacher and anti-fascist activist, during the Spanish Civil War she organised and accompanied hundreds of children to France.

The daughter of a Swiss family living in the Putxet neighbourhood, she worked as a teacher at the Swiss School of Barcelona. When the school closed, she moved to England. In 1938, she returned to Barcelona to work with the The Swiss Aid Committee to help the children of Spain. After the Civil War, she directed the ‘Chateau du Lac’ colony of refugee children in Sigean and another in Pringy, close to the border with Switzerland. During the Second World War, she risked her life to hide and care for Jewish children.

She is a spokeswoman for silenced Iranian women and the protests over the murder of Masha Amini by the Ayatollah's regime. A translator, interpreter and disseminator of Iranian culture, she has translated the works of the Persian poet Mahvash Sabet, who has faced retaliation and is currently imprisoned. She has also translated a selection of poems by Abbas Kiarostami.

She has lived in Barcelona for a number of years. In addition to her work as a translator, she has also served as an interpreter at the United Nations and a facilitator at the Was Ras and Quatre Camins prisons. She is also a speaker and contributes to newspapers and TV as an expert on the situation of women in Iran.

The area around the Pau-Dos de Maig metro stop forms part of her lifescape.

An anti-racist activist and feminist, actress, scriptwriter and theatre director. Her play co-produced by Carolina Torres, No es país para negras, has been performed all over Spain. The show explains what it means to be an Afro-descendant woman in Spain.

She graduated from the Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático of Murcia and lives and works in Barcelona. As an actress, she denounces the fact that she has only been chosen to play prostitutes, criminals or cleaning women. As a theatre director, she has overseen shows like Blackface y otras vergüenzas and Parad de pararme.

Based on her dissatisfaction with the way Afro-descendants are portrayed onstage and onscreen, she founded the Col·lectiu Tinta Negra and co-created the Cooperativa Periferia Cimarronas cultural space near Plaça del Centre.

Between 1970 and 1979, almost 1,000 people were imprisoned for defending LGTBI rights in application of the Social Danger and Rehabilitation Act. They include Silvia Reyes, an activist involved in the struggle for the rights of transgender people who suffered from retaliation and was deprived of her freedom by being imprisoned around 50 times, including in the former Model prison. A resident of Barcelona since 1973, she has worked to promote the recognition, visibility and dignification of LGBTI people. In 1975, after being imprisoned in Badajoz for almost two months, she returned to Barcelona, but a judicial order forced her to leave Catalonia and not return for at least two years. Given her forced exile, she worked in cabarets and shows in France, Belgium and Switzerland. On 26 June 1977, she participated in the  first LGBT pride demonstration in Spain, which went along Barcelona's Ramblas and ended with police charges. Aware of the advances in recent decades but also the constant challenges of combating discrimination and inequality, her struggle for the rights of transsexual people continues today.

Philosopher, professor and pacifist. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she was a philosophy professor at a school in Bourges. She left teaching and took a train to Barcelona to defend the government of the Republic. She was a member of the Durruti Column fighting on the Aragon front, where she wrote a personal diary about her war experiences. After suffering an accident on the front, she returned to France, where she got involved in the resistance against Nazism.

As a philosopher, she cultivated mystical thinking with a strong social commitment.

Teacher, journalist, anarchist, feminist and mother of Frederica Montseny.  In 1886 at the age of 22, she founded the first secular school in Spain in Vilanova i la Geltrú and was a member of the Teachers’ Confederation of Catalonia.

As a journalist and thinker, she signed her texts with the name Soledad Gustavo. She stood out for her activism in the main struggles of the early twentieth century. She and her husband, Joan Montseny, issued the literary publication Revista Blanca (1898 - 1905 and 1923 - 1936). Writers like Unamuno, Pío Baroja and Francesc Pi i Margall contributed to the publication.  In her lectures and in publications like ‘El amor libre’ and ‘La sociedad futura’, she was a steadfast defender of a more egalitarian society, women's emancipation and free love. She also conducted research and campaigns to secure the release of those imprisoned in the Canvis Nous case and in defence of Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia.

On the morning of 6 October 1991, a group of neo-Nazis beat Sonia and Doris Romero as they were sleeping in Ciutadella park. The two transsexual women lived on the streets and had sought shelter in the park for the night, when they were the victims of a brutal attack that took Sonia’s life and left Doris severely injured. Her murder sparked a lively social debate on the discrimination and violence suffered by transsexual people. Sonia came to Barcelona in 1961 at the age of 16 and joined the world of the artists on Paral·lel. She earned widespread fame at the Teatre Arnau as a vedette, but with the crisis in variety shows she was forced to live and work on the street. Her memory lives on in a city that still fights for the rights of LGBTI people. In 2013 a commemorative plaque was put on the bandstand in Ciutadella Park, where she was murdered, to remember her story, and the bandstand was officially renamed ‘Plaça de Sonia Rescalvo Zafra’.

An entrepreneur and defender of the right to education, she set up a childcare service in her cotton factory, along with a library where many women learned how to read and write. She inherited an industrial complex that she began to run in 1910 at the age of 22, although the job was officially her husband’s because at that time a woman could not run a business. With a staff of 1,200 people, primarily women, she advocated for the improvement of their working conditions with services that would enhance their education and make it possible for them to balance work and family responsibilities at a time when childcare was the sole responsibility of women. The library, company store, infirmary and childcare space were not only an advance for the women workers, they also signalled recognition of the job of caregiving and an opportunity for the children to grow up in an environment that was not fraught with precariousness. Upon her husband's death in 1926, she started to officially run her companies and continued to do so for decades. The Torrassa stop is near the former factory and current Centre d’Art Tecla Sala, located at Av. de Josep Tarradellas i Joan, 44 in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Weaver, anarcho-syndicalist and feminist, she spent her entire life fighting to defend the rights of workers and women.

In 1884 she founded the Miscellaneous Section of Anarcho-Collectivist Workers of Sabadell, and in 1892 she created the Autonomous Society of Women in Barcelona, regarded as the country's first feminist institution.

She suffered from retaliation and was often arrested for her activism. In 1896 she was sentenced in the famous Montjuïc Trials and banished to London, where she became close friends with the anarchist Teresa Mañé. She was also imprisoned for her participation in the Tragic Week of 1909.

In the early twentieth century, she founded a variety of publications like El productor, and in 1905 she published La mujer. Consideraciones sobre su estado ante las prerrogativas del hombre (1905), where she proposed salary equity between men and women.

Near the Provençana station there is a street that is named after her to preserve her memory.

She is an iconic movie star and an extraordinarily talented actress, as confirmed by the 155 films she has made during her career. She started out in the world of advertising, working as a model in the early 1960s, and was also part of the leftist artistic and intellectual movement Gauche Divine, whose epicentre of activity was Barcelona’s Bocaccio Boite. She entered the world of cinema in the mid-1960s, and thereafter became a constant presence in magazines, TV programmes and films. She worked with Victor Aranda, Pedro Lazaga, Mariano Ozores and Antonio Mercero, but one of her favourite films is the masterpiece by Víctor Erice, El espíritu de la colmena. In 1984, she began her career as a businesswoman and founded the Gimpera Models school in Barcelona, while only occasionally going back to acting. The Catalan government awarded her the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’s Cross) in 2017.

She was the voice of exile via her numerous publications.

A writer, journalist and anti-fascist activist, she was exiled for more than three decades. She was the author of novels, journals, essays, articles and reports. Her engagement with politics began at a young age. At 16 she founded the National Alliance of Young Women and participated in a rally alongside Lluís Companys and Federica Montseny, and in 1937 she joined the Unified Socialist Youth of Catalonia. During the Civil War, she continued her activism by supporting the front and seeking international allies to support the Republic.

Before going into exile, she witnessed the republicans who had been wounded in the war being removed from the Hospital de Vallcarca before Franco’s troops arrived. She recounted this event and many others that she experienced in the war and exile in works like Quan erem Capitans and Gent del meu exili.

At the age of 20, she went into exile first in France and later in Mexico, where she studied journalism. From exile, she contributed to magazines like Serra d’Or and Oriflama and wrote works likeTestament a Praga, which won her the Josep Pla award. She returned to Barcelona for the first time to collect this award in 1971.

In recognition of her career, she was awarded different distinctions like the Gold Medal of Artistic Merit from Barcelona City Council in1997 and the Catalan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

An anti-fascist fighter and writer, she was affiliated with the Communist Youth and the PCE. In 1939, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison, six of which she served. After spending time in various different prisons, she was released and sent into exile in Barcelona. She was affiliated with the United Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) and in 1945 was arrested once again and brutally tortured by the brothers Vicente and Antonio Juan Creix. She entered the Les Cortes women's prison, where she was kept until 1946, when she was released on parole. She continued her struggle underground, and after 1947 she conducted a long series of interviews with former women prison mates, which culminated in different books published in the early 1980s. In 2004 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George’ s Cross) from the government of Catalonia in acknowledgement of her career in the anti-Franco struggle. In 2015, the Les Corts Civic Centre came to be called the Tomasa Cuevas Centre in memory of all the women like her who suffered from repression and fought for freedom during the Franco regime.

Nurse, midwife and communist activist.

As a nurse, she created the committee of secular nurses at San Carlos hospital in Madrid, where she worked during the Civil War. When the conflict was over, she was arrested and sentenced first to death and later to 30 years for joining the military rebellion. Despite the review of her sentence in 1941, which led to her release, she was arrested and imprisoned at different penitentiary centres numerous times for other crimes. Whenever she was imprisoned, she worked as a nurse and midwife and strove to improve the hygiene and sanitary conditions in the prison.

Once released, she moved to the Porta neighbourhood, where she worked as a physician's assistant and joined the grassroots struggles to dignify the neighbourhood. In 1997, she and Josefina Piquet co-founded The Women of ‘36, an association that strove to preserve the historical memory of the women who lived through the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

A historian and activist for the conservation of heritage and memory, she co-founded the Historical Research Centre of Poble-sec, the neighbourhood where she lived. She combined teaching with activism, defending the conservation of El Molino when the investor who bought the building took down the Modernist decoration designed by M. Raspall. She mobilised with the neighbourhood residents, managed to recover part of the heritage and launched an intense campaign to save the venue. Later, she got involved in preserving air-raid shelter 307, struggling tirelessly to have it turned into a museum with institutional backing. Refuge 307 is currently part of the Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA) and can be visited with a guide.

An activist and driving force behind Las Kellys, an association that has sought to dignify the working conditions of hotel chambermaids since 2014.

Trained as a teacher in Peru, she was unable to get her degree officially recognised when she came to Spain in 1992 and so she worked as a carer for older people and in cleaning. Later she specialised in the hygiene and cleaning of hotel rooms, where she became aware of the precarious working conditions of her colleagues. To improve the working conditions, she founded Las Kellys to secure professional recognition of this sector. In 2018, the Catalan Parliament approved the proposal from the Las Kellys union of Catalonia to create a Fair and Quality Work Seal to guarantee decent working conditions. Despite the fact that it was approved, this certification has not yet been implemented.

The Europa Fira stop connects the city with the Fira de Barcelona pavilions, shopping areas and hotels that accommodate thousands of tourists each year.

An activist in the fight against child sexual abuse, which she herself experienced between the ages of five and seventeen. She verbalised it as an adult and realised that one of the main problems facing victims of this type of violence is the lack of acceptance within their family environment. She decided to get involved in preventing child sexual violence in 1997, initially by establishing the organisation FADA which was renamed the Vicki Bernadet Foundation in 2006. The foundation not only works to prevent and raise awareness of child sexual abuse in the family environment, but it also supports adults who have experienced abuse with specialised social, psychological and legal assistance. Its territorial scope encompasses all of Catalonia and Aragon via the resources available at its branches in Barcelona and Zaragoza.

A writer and multidisciplinary artist, she signed her creations with the male pseudonym Víctor Català, the name of the main character of one of her unfinished novels. Solitud, published in 1905, is a seminal work of modernism. She grew up in a family of rural landowners, and she inherited her interest in the literary world from her grandmother. In 1898 she won two prizes at the Jocs Florals of Girona for the poem ‘Lo llibre nou’ and the monologue ‘La infanticida’. The reaction this sparked in the literary world of the day, astonished that a woman was capable of writing a text of such high quality, profoundly disappointed her, and she soon choose a male pseudonym which she would keep for the rest of her writing career. El cant dels mesos, Drames rurals, Ombrívoles and Lo llibre blanc are some of her most prominent works, along with the aforementioned Solitud, which made her one of the key female exponents of the Catalan literary tradition. She also held posts in the cultural field, such as the presidency of the 1917 Jocs Florals of Barcelona and participated as a member of the Catalan Language Academy in 1915 and the Barcelona Academy of Belles Lettres after 1923. The Llucmajor stop is located near the secondary school which is named after her.

This Barcelona-born soprano was one of the great legends of lyric opera of the twentieth century. Acclaimed by the best opera theatres in the world, she was one of the featured voices at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. She also regularly performed at New York's Met, the Royal Opera House in London, the Opéra National in Paris, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and La Scala in Milan. She played a key role in exporting Spanish folklore with popular songs from the Baroque and Renaissance. Her repertoire was comprised of Catalan, Basque, Galician, Mallorcan and Sephardic songs. She was recognised with many awards, like the Gold Medal from the government of Catalonia (1982). On 1 November of this year, coinciding with the centenary of her birth, Victoria de los Ángeles Year will open with an official event and a concert at the University of Barcelona, the place where she was born 100 years ago. The Palau de la Música, one of the venues where she performed, is close to the Jaume I metro stop.

An anti-fascist and neighbourhood activist, she was involved in the citizen calls to tear down the towers of the former women’s prison in Trinitat Vella, where she herself had been imprisoned. The process led to it being torn down in 2009, even though a part of its facilities still stand today to hold young prisoners in the open prison system. The penitentiary was used during the dictatorship to transfer political prisoners, a situation that Victoria herself experienced when she was imprisoned for being a ‘red’ at the tender age of 17. In 2002, she participated in the conference entitled Els camps de concentració i el món penitenciari a Espanya durant la Guerra Civil i el franquisme with the talk Una experiencia inolvidable:  El estado de Excepción de 1969, in which she shared the experiences of her fellow prison mates, fighting women who, like her, fought against the Franco dictatorship.

Librarian. She is the director of the Sant Pau-Santa Creu Library and previously of the Bon Pastor Library. She is noted for organising events in support of social cohesion within the neighbourhoods. She champions libraries as unique, free social spaces where everyone has a place. At the Bon Pastor Library, community projects have been running for over 15 years to bring the library closer to the neighbourhood by taking it to the streets.

She studied Library Science and Documentation at the University of Barcelona and is an expert in cultural mediation. She was awarded the Medal of Honour of Barcelona in 2019 thanks to her efforts to promote integration and community harmony.