Unknown air-raid shelters from the Civil War located in Barcelona
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A study by the historians Xavier Domènech and Ana Sánchez makes it possible to document some 400 of the 1,300 bunkers in the city, including 38 that had never been photographed before
An investigation carried out by the photographer Ana Sánchez and the historian Xavier Domènech has allowed document some 400 of the 1,300 Barcelona anti-aircraft shelters from the Civil War, and photograph 38, some of them unpublished, a work that will be part of an exhibition at Barcelona City Council at La Modelo. the researchers have located private shelters in Sarrià that were not in the 1938 census and they have accessed others that, even though they were registered, were not known, such as the Fábrica de la Verneda, the Fábrica Damm or the Escola Popular de Guerra de Catalunya (located in the Escoles Pies de Sarrià), reports EFE. “They had never been photographed,” they emphasize.
Domènech explains that both the exhibition, entitled ‘1,322’, and the research emphasize that it is the “main urban heritage in the city, very unknown and it also refers to the historical memory of the Civil War”.
In his opinion, it was “a colossal construction” which allowed more than 1,300 shelters to be erected in record time, from the first bombardment of the city in February 1937 to the last on 25th 1939 with the fall of Barcelona. Although the subject has been dealt with from historiography, it is with large-format photographs, which will open next Marchaims to “value this heritage for the public, reflect on events that are from the past, but are still present, and also think about the future” through an artistic proposal.
In addition, Domènech notes, this heritage is “a mirror of solidarity of the city in the 30ssince most of the shelters were built where there was a higher density of entities”. Barely 5% of the shelters were directly assumed by the public administrations.
massive bombings
The shelters, summarizes the historian and former deputy of En Comú Podem, evoke “the response of a civilian population that suffered massive bombardments for the first timea new technique of total war tested in Barcelona and later reproduced in the Second World War, whose only aim was to cause terror and the paralysis of society itself”.
Sevillian by birth and living in Barcelona since 2001, Ana Sánchez, also a journalist, began to take an interest in shelters in 2007, when she photographed some of these spaces for the exhibition ‘When it rained bombs’: “The one in Pedralbes that welcomed the President of the Republic, Juan Negrínthe one on Pasaje Simò and the one on Valencia street shook me”. Fifteen years later, and with the support of the Barcelona Archeology Service, the Mossos d’Esquadra Subsoil Unit and the neighbors who have opened the doors of their homes for them to historians.
In this work there is a family origin, Sánchez confesses, since his maternal family suffered Franco’s repression in southern Spain. “If the subsoil of Andalusia was full of graves, the one I discovered in Barcelona was full of shelters”aim.
affected by humidity
The main difficulty in carrying out this graphic research has been, according to the author, “the constant presence of water and humidity, which fogs up the lens and often blocks the camera, and the conditions in which the photos have been taken have sometimes been very complicated, with water up to the waistsometimes with little oxygen and no electricity.” That is why it took them 15 months to photograph the 38 shelters.
The largest shelter photographed is the one in Plaza de Tetuán, which was a public initiative, “totally clad in concrete, of a quality and an architectural invoice other than frequent, and with a much greater capacity than the mine gallery and private shelters visited”. It is difficult to establish a chronology of the construction of the shelters, because a large part of the documentation went into exile and another part was lost, says Sánchez.
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Under the Palau de la Generalitat there is a shelter that was recovered in 2017 and which has the typical characteristics of a space for political leaders. It was “built with more quality than community shelters,” historians note. On the other hand, “there is no evidence that there was a shelter under the town hall building even though it made sense that there would be, and, in fact, the exhibition will talk about the continuity of the institutional life of the city under the bombs”, they add.
Sánchez indicates that he wanted to return to the shelters “with today’s perspective, collect with the camera the trace of time and all the lives that have passedwith a low key light, without forcing it excessively and respecting the large dark areas, the chiaroscuro and the penumbras”. These are photos that show “the daily life of the past, the tunnels full of rubble, roots, bricks or moldy cables , and also the concrete tongues that sometimes seal their entrances”.The shelters are in force as can be seen in the War in Ukrainewhere refuges from the Cold War have had to be recovered, which makes one think that unfortunately this past does not pass, it is a present”, asserts Domènech.