Barcelona City Council is publishing ‘1.322. Una mirada fotogràfica als refugis antiaeris de Barcelona’, by Xavier Domènech and Ana Sánchez, the legacy that the Civil War’s aerial bombings left under Barcelona’s streets, a unique heritage in Europe. This photographic and research work is on display in the exhibition entitled “1.322. Refugis antiaeris de Barcelona”, on at La Model. Barcelona Memory Space, from 30 March to 31 July 2023, organised by the Councillor’s Office for Democratic Memory.
This book offers 170 previously unpublished pictures of air raid shelters from the Civil War in Barcelona which saved thousands of lives between 1937 and 1939. Community and private shelters as well as shelters belonging to collectivised factories, Republican institutions and political leaders, such as Juan Negrín and Lluís Companys, reveal a hidden city 10 metres underground.
“There are no more shelter entrances vomiting out mother’s screams at night, they won’t be back killing children from the sky: from now on, kids, danger will be lurking everywhere and nowhere, the threat will be invisible and constant”, wrote Juan Marsé in Si te dicen que caí.
Barcelona became a dress rehearsal for the Second World War, where Franco’s troops and their Italian fascist allies took advantage of the vulnerability of a society living through the Spanish Civil War. The objective, besides destroying the city’s industries, was to cow the population, and turn it into the main target through constant aerial bombing. This new technique, known as saturation bombing, was tried out first in Barcelona and then in the rest of Catalonia, as a testing ground, and later in the rest of Europe.
Shelters, a model of resistance
The result of these attacks was that over a million kilos of bombs were dropped on Barcelona, causing over 2,700 deaths and 7,000 injuries, between 13 February 1937 and 25 January 1939. But the reaction of the city’s residents, as a model of resistance, survival and rejection, was to build air raid shelters, to protect themselves from the bombings. A total of 1,322 shelters were built in Barcelona and are now part of our heritage and collective memory, as an element, too, of communal self-organisation.
“I understood that, while a new way of waging war had been launched against Barcelona, a new and extraordinary capacity for resistance also arose through the shelters: for the first time, far from the front, the population of a 100 km2 city were digging up the ground with pickaxes and shovels to maintain a fragile daily life under the bombings”, explains Ana Sánchez, one of the book’s co-authors.
Once the war ended, the shelters fell into oblivion. “At the beginning, some were conserved in case Franco attempted to intervene in the Second World War on the side of his fascist and Nazi brothers, while others were used as a play space for child survivors or even as initial shanties for families moving to the city. Barcelona, during its developmentalist stage, finally ended up burying them all from sight. Our memory of them was revived with the arrival of the new democratic stage. And, once again, an initiative from the city’s social fabric played a key part in the process. In fact, the shelters, as a present fragment of a past, to paraphrase Octavio Paz, are an incorruptible witness of history”, explains Xavier Domènech, the book’s other co-author.
Self-organised civil society
Of the 1,322 inventoried shelters, the figure which the book and exhibition are named after, only 5% were built directly from institutions, while another 10% received public subsidies. The rest were constructed by self-organised civil society. In fact, far from corresponding to the areas worst hit by the Aviazione Legionaria and Condor Legion, the shelter density is directly linked to the associations network. So neighbourhoods such as Les Corts, Sarrià and Sant Gervasi, which, in addition, also had lower population densities, had proportionately fewer shelters than the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella, Sants and Gràcia, where there was a strongly rooted culture of local-resident cooperation.
Presentation: 6 June
The book will be presented on Tuesday, 6 June, at 6.30 pm, at the La Model’s function room (Entença, 155). Taking part in the event will be the book’s authors, Ana Sánchez, a journalist and photographer, and Xavier Domènech, a lecturer in history at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, as well as David Fernàndez, a journalist, and Jaume Muñoz Jofre, the Director of Memory, History and Heritage at Barcelona City Council.