Time was, of course, when Barcelona’s status as an industrial powerhouse was unquestioned. Before the Spanish Civil War, Poblenou was home to various automobile factories and was known as the ‘Detroit of the Mediterranean’. The city was famous for its Anarchist and Socialist trade unions, which waged relentless battles to improve working conditions. The factories also left the pollution of a century of heavy industrialisation and it’s still with us, in the massive ‘black zone’ of toxic metals now lying in the sea-floor mud at the mouth of the Besòs River. Indeed, before the city’s major facelift in the early Nineties, Barcelona was generally avoided by tourists, who viewed the city as a gritty and grey Turin, a place to work, but not to play.
Now, however, with tourists spending upwards of €9 million a day in Barcelona, according to the Barcelona Tourism Office, the question might well be asked whether the city produces anything other than designer doodads, hotel rooms, docking space for cruise ships and nouvelle cuisine by the bucketload. Apart from tourist euros, what exactly is the meat and bones of the city’s top-ranked economy? And, should the fickle finger of tourist favour point in some other direction, how will that economy fare?
One of the answers to these questions lies in a discreet but immensely effective semi-public body, the Consorci de la Zona Franca. Formed in 1926, the Consorci, as its full name implies, originally limited its role to managing the Zona Franca, a duty-free area by the port that grew over time to become a 600-hectare industrial zone stretching along the Delta de Llobregat between the port and the airport. Shielded from general view by Montjuïc, it is indeed a place of work and no play. Home to hundreds of companies, including the Nissan car factory, the Zona Franca has been Spain’s dominant industrial zone since Franco reluctantly agreed to locate the Seat car factory there in the early Fifties. (In 1993, Seat moved its factory to Martorell.)
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