VISITING

From Winston Churchill’s ‘Finest hour’ speech to the British House of Commons, June 18th, 1940

On the surface, Barcelona is in many ways an archetypal 21st-century city with a multicultural population and streets filled with innovation. However, lying below ground in different parts of the city are refugis aeris, public air raid shelters, constructed during the Spanish Civil War. They bear testament to the years between 1937 and 1939, when Barcelona became one of the first cities in the world whose civilian population was targeted for attacks, despite the fact that the fighting of the war was taking place elsewhere.

When Churchill spoke the words quoted above, he was referring to the imminent danger of bombing attacks on British cities by the German air force, and singled Barcelona out not only for the fact it was an early victim of urbicide (killing of a city), but also because the response of its citizens to this threat was proactive and practical, with many people working together to construct the air raid shelters that saved thousands of lives.

Air raids started on Barcelona on March 16th 1937, at 10.08pm. With front-line fighting still nowhere near the city, Barcelona’s war until then was largely characterised by shortages of food and other goods, the arrival of refugees from elsewhere in Spain and the movement of soldiers to the front. All this changed when planes of Franco’s Fascist allies, Italy and Germany, began dropping their bombs on the city. For them, Barcelona and other Spanish cities like Guernica presented an opportunity to test the strategy of attacking civilians, and the Italians sent a plane equipped with a camera to capture images of the results.

Testament, too, to the newness of the air raids is the fact that in the early days, when the planes flew overhead, people went out on the streets to see what was happening. But this quickly changed. Instead, the people of Barcelona took matters into their own hands, constructing many of the city’s 1,300-1,400 air raid shelters, and neighbourhood associations such as festa major organisers moved into action to manage the building of the underground refugis. Some funds were provided by the city council and Generalitat, and engineers provided the designs, in particular one Ramón Perera, now credited as the principal architect of Barcelona’s shelters. The actual building work, however, was done by the elderly, women and children who made up much of the local population by that point. One eyewitness, Josep Roig, interviewed for a 2006 TV3 documentary on Perera recounted, “It was a general and fast phenomenon. In four days, we built 1,200 shelters!”