Photo: Arianna Giménez

It was a Saturday, 29 April 1967, when Roberto Lahuerta Melero went to the cinema for the first time since he’d arrived in Barcelona four years earlier with his family, from Ainzón in Zaragoza. His exhaustive accounts of Barcelona’s cinemas reveal a nostalgic memory filled with infinite gratitude for all the elements of that landscape. A picture that begins in the Turó cinema, where he attended a double feature (La ciudad no es para mí and La carga de la policía montada), but which could apply equally well to a large part of the converted theatres which, as cinemas, provided affordable leisure and cultural settings for the working classes.

Over the following decades, the historical establishments – neighbourhood cinemas and other, classier, first – run downtown cinemas – came up time and again against the challenge of survival: the tastes and habits of the public in matters of entertainment underwent enormous changes and the cinema as a form of leisure or even a lifestyle struggled to adapt to the new facts of life. Throughout this struggle, and over and above the overpowering creeping commercialism, alternative circuits have been established that have allowed new experiences for cinema-lovers while preserving the best of the traditional ones and have even, in some cases, managed to recover the local roots of the old neighbourhood cinemas. We look at this phenomenon through the eyes of some of its main protagonists.

One of Lahuerta Melero’s books – Barcelona tuvo cines de barrio (Editorial Temporae, 2015) – conjures up the old neighbourhood cinemas in terms like these: wooden and/or velvet walls, an elderly lady in the ticket office, uncomfortable, creaking seats, the tap water in the toilets with that taste of chlorine, everyone having their tea or supper among the audience – ‘the pleasure of eating a sandwich and some fruit in between films is something I still miss’ –, loud comments, some wittier than others, about what was being shown, and the vestibules like improvised crèches full of children bored with the grown-ups’ films. Those cinemas were an important sign of identity of Barcelona’s neighbourhoods at a time when, apart from bullfights and football, society had few means of entertainment.

The neighbourhood cinemas worked like second-run cinemas, with double features of films that had already been dropped from the first-run theatres. In those days you could go in at any time, halfway through the film, and wait until it started again to see the bit you’d missed. The large first-run theatres like the Urgell or the Novetats, with seating for more than 2,000 people, had exclusive rights for the province or even for Catalonia. Octavi Martí, Assistant Director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya, remembers that at weekends buses came from all over the country to see West Side Story, for example. Exclusive rights meant that a lot of films stayed for ever in the cinemas, as people always came to see them, which meant that scheduling new releases was blocked.

Octavi Martí, Subdirector of the Filmoteca de Catalunya and curator of the exhibition on show there about the Cercle A.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

The same year that Roberto Lahuerta Melero set foot in the Turó cinema for the first time to see La ciudad no es para mí, Pere Fages and Antonio Kirschner decided to launch an idea they called Cercle A, scheduling art films screened in the original language, in ordinary cinemas. They got in touch with Jaume Figueras, who was working as a publicist for CB Films. ‘They were friends of his and knew he was a very good businessman’, remembers Octavi Martí, who is also curator of the exhibition ‘La quadratura del cercle A’, which is being put on at the Filmoteca de Catalunya until 11 February to mark its 50th birthday.

The three partners made a market study to find the best-placed cinemas. The first one they looked at was the Publi cinema, located in what is now the Bulevard Rosa, which they turned into the first repertory cinema in Spain. Until then it had only screened children’s films and documentaries. They were given the evening programme to run and in 1967 they opened with Ingmar Bergman’s Dreams, which was followed by titles like José María Nunes’s Night of Red Wine and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, their first film in the original language and at the same time their first real success.

From there they went on to screen auteur films at various cinemas whose name – except for the Publi – contained an ‘A’: Alexis, Aquitania, Arcadia, Arkadin, Ars, Atenas, Capsa, Casablanca, Maldà. At the Atenas, British productions with social content; at the Alexis, the most intellectually risky films (it was the smallest); at the Casablancas, films for younger people; at the Ars, double features with one old and one modern film; as for the more bourgeois Arcadia, ‘which was in Carrer Tuset, they put on more Rohmer films about married couples in crisis’ explains Octavi Martí, the curator of the exhibition.

They managed to give each cinema its own identity, so that the spectator could go there without knowing what was on, but confident that whatever it was they would enjoy it. Some time in the 80s they premiered a Chinese film, the first in this country for years. It was called Red Sorghum: ‘Completely unknown and hard to sell, it nevertheless drew 10,000 spectators. That was how much weight the Cercle A fan club carried. It wasn’t bad, it ensured production’, says Martí.

In addition, they innovated in the way they advertised the films, especially thanks to Jaume Figueras’s publicity skills. To get more people to see The Hairdresser’s Husband when it had already been on for a year and a half, they decided to invite the director (Patrice Leconte) and the leading actress (Anna Galiena) and put a barber’s chair in the entrance to the cinema. Anyone buying a ticket for the film got a free shave.

The rise of a new spectator

In this way, the Cercle A made a decisive contribution to the creation in Barcelona of a new film spectator. For Octavi Martí it was, in fact, ‘a spectator’s club with its own way of viewing films. A public that read subtitles quite happily and that understood that the cinema has an intellectual value that places it above pure entertainment’. And who got used to being given a film sheet with information about the film and reviews at a time when there were no film courses in universities or schools.

The director Ventura Pons in the office of his production company. In 2014 he began his adventure of buying a cinema, the Texas, and giving it a schedule and an identity.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

Sitting on one of those sofas where your knees are higher than your hips, Ventura Pons answers questions sometimes with few words, sometimes at length. He lights cigarettes that burn away between his fingers and drinks coffee as though it were water. When we ask him about the launch of his first film – Ocaña, retrato intermitente –, he answers at length: ‘I launched it 40 years ago, in June 1978, a few months after censorship disappeared. We filmed it clandestinely and it was like a snowball that grew when it entered the official selection for the Cannes festival’. It made its debut with the Cercle A. Ocaña bought flowers and they decorated the premiere with Manila shawls. ‘It’s a film that’s as if it were made now, because the message is still current’, says the Barcelona film-maker. And he ends his reminiscences with this sentence: ‘Film fixes things; the theatre doesn’t’.

Not long ago, in 2014, Ventura Pons set off on an adventure consisting in buying a cinema and providing it with a programme and an identity. When he was asked why, at this stage in his career, with his life settled, he ventured into this undertaking, Pons answered in headlines: ‘What led me to reopen the Texas cinemas was my commitment to life. My life is the cinema and the cinema is my life.’ A more prosaic explanation is that when he heard that Ricard Almazán was being laid off as scheduler for the Verdi cinemas after 25 years in the post, Ventura Pons saw the light: ‘I spoke to Almazán, now Captain Texas, and we got down to looking for cinemas’.

The film-maker, playwright and author unaffectedly describes the basic element of his cinematographic offer: ‘We haven’t invented anything, we offer re-releases like the ones there were when I was little, second runs, as they call them. They were good, nice and cheap. Three euros admission. What more can I say? All these things make people come back to the cinema.’ And he stops to point out that although they sell plenty of tickets, ‘unfortunately, the money goes to Montoro [the Treasury Minister]’.

Pons has been directing films and plays and writing books for 40 years. As we speak he seems to be in something of a hurry to end the interview. But when it actually ends, he forgets the time and invites us to take a look around with him in a little room belonging to his production company where he keeps original screenplays with his hand-written notes and crossings out – some by the censor, he tells us – and carefully handwritten yellowing family correspondence.

Pons remembers how the film offer and film consumption has changed in Barcelona society. ‘Until the 70s you could distinguish the films by the producer: Metro, Fox, Warner – he checks them off on his fingers. But nowadays they’re all the same. What’s more, they’ve moved audiences out of the centre of the city with the offer in large shopping centres on the outskirts. “Fast cinema”’.

The proliferation of centres equipped with a holistic offer in entertainment for an afternoon of family consumerism is something that comes largely from the United States. North-American society goes almost everywhere by car, it feels uncomfortable out of doors because it’s colder than here, and it’s quite happy to haunt enclosed, sometimes even underground shopping centres, unlike a Mediterranean society like ours, which prefers to walk about, to get out of doors. That business model began to get established in Barcelona in the 80s and was decisive for understanding the change resulting from the success of multiplexes in film consumption.

Members of the public at the screening of Roman Polanski’s film Repulsion, the first film to be shown at the Publi cinema in the original language, in 1967, when the Cercle A took charge of the scheduling and turned it into the first repertory cinema in Spain.
Photo: Filmoteca de Catalunya

Cercle A lasted a few years, until 1992. The reasons it came to an end, according to Octavi Martí, can be found in the very success of the project. ‘Other companies also saw there was money to be made and also started screening films in the original version, but not all of them had good judgement or knew how to sell what they were offering.’ The three people behind Cercle A didn’t own the cinemas, they weren’t that ambitious, and when businessmen who did and were started to do business on their turf they were overwhelmed. ‘They began to steal the names that they had managed to make popular’, says Martí. The commercial circuits, with their hegemonic cultural discourse, once again swallowed up an alternative project with their all-devouring market logic. ‘As a global phenomenon, the humanities have lost a lot of weight in general culture. People no longer feel uncomfortable if they haven’t seen a famous film’, says Octavi Martí from a little office at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. ‘Broadly speaking, curiosity has disappeared.’

Television, video and commercial judgement

The phenomenon of neighbourhood cinemas or second-run theatres isn’t so old, although it no longer exists in the form it took until the 80s. The excitement over adult movie theatres after the dictatorship and the recovery of other films that had been censored cushioned the fall in audiences slightly, but subsequent rapid advances in technology and fashions, the universalisation of television – and home video, which lets you pause the film to go to the toilet…– and, to top it all, the dominance of an industry that gave priority to financial returns over cinematographic quality or the social involvement of what was being shown in cinemas, put an end to those neighbourhood cinemas. With them went the chance to go to a double feature and meet neighbours, friends or classmates, as well as those conversations about the film during the week that used to be so common.

According to 2016 figures from the Observatori de Dades Culturals de Barcelona (Barcelona Cultural Data Observatory), which depends on the Barcelona City Council’s Culture Institute, in Barcelona that year there were 173 cinemas – 20 less than in 2010 –, which were used by more than six million spectators – as opposed to seven and a half million in 2010 – with a box-office turnover of more than 42 million euros – six years before it had been almost 55 million. Every day less people go to the cinema.

Vestibule of the Phenomena, a cross between a neighbourhood cinema and a large first-run theatre.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

‘Phenomena’, a hybrid experience

Nacho Cerdà, manager of the Phenomena cinema, remembers that it used to be possible to walk around the Barcelona neighbourhoods and ‘classify each cinema as first-run theatres, second-run theatres or repertory theatres. Each one had a different offer and now it seems everything has been homogenised in those shopping centres where practically 100% of the film offer is commercial cinema’.

In the same way as the Cercle A – screening in cinemas without owning any of them –, Nacho Cerdà began organising his Phenomena sessions in December 2010 in different Barcelona cinemas. Recovering great classics that have constituted a cinematographic pop culture in the modern iconic imaginary, they began to gain in popularity until in 2014 he opened his own cinema: ‘Every director’s or film-lover’s wet dream is to open that cinema where you can put on your ideal programme’.

A defender of the single auditorium, where all the audience gets together in the dark for almost two hours to watch the same story on the silver screen, Cerdà doesn’t like spectators having to leave by the emergency exit, for example. He feels they ought to leave by the main entrance again. The cinema experience shouldn’t end until you’re out in the street’, he declares. What is seductive about his project is that people should be able to go to the cinema and socialise, talking, having a drink… in short, taking part in ‘that sort of social event that has gradually been lost in the multiplexes’.

The films screened at Phenomena date from the 30s down to our own day. A mixture, as Cerdà sees it, of two concepts of cinema that at first sight seem antagonistic: the little neighbourhood cinema and the large first-run theatre. Recently Phenomena has been putting on more blockbusters than before. It helps to pay for the minority films, the ones that are ‘the apple of my eye’, as Cerdà confesses: ‘On one hand, films from the 70s that 20 people come to see and, on the other, Star Wars’.

Although it looks to the past, Cerdà doesn’t think his offer feeds on cinema-lovers’ nostalgia. ‘No. I’ve heard that argument a few times and I don’t agree. The cinema is ancient, you might think the act of going to the cinema is nostalgic now, but no. Here we just want to transmit the experience of the silver screen, the velvet, the single auditorium, the red carpet’. Cerdà says he often goes into the auditorium to watch the film just like any other spectator. ‘I love seeing how people react to the collective experience of seeing a film at the cinema and not at home’.

To Cerdà, ‘the survival’ (he laughs as he utters this word, as though to take the drama out of it) ‘of some cinemas, like ours or the Verdi, Girona, Renoir, Texas, and even the Floridablanca, has meant that there are people who still see the cinema in this way, as a philosophy’, and he points out that what distinguishes these cinemas from the multiplexes is, once again, trust. ‘Nowadays it’s not just a question of going to the cinema, people go for other reasons, too. These cinemas have a lot of faithful followers who don’t go just for a specific film, but, in general, just to see what’s on’.

It’s not an easy job. Nacho’s aware of the wear and tear involved in running a cinema. ‘You wouldn’t believe how hard eight well-organised people can work. We have to negotiate with distributors, keep an attractive programme going, see to the public and their needs and, of course, cover the expense of maintaining the premises. I can tell you, if I wanted easy money I’d work at something less complicated’, he says, without a jot of regret for the adventure he set out on three years ago.

Xavier Escrivà, who since 2010 has been directing the Maldà alongside Natàlia Regàs. Escrivà began his long relationship with this cinema in Ciutat Vella as a spectator, when he was an employee at the Galeries Maldà, and later, at the beginning of the 80s, as an usher.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

It’s a tough life at the Maldà

Xavi Escrivà’s got everything ready for the session at ten past three. This time it’s the documentary film Kedi – ‘the Citizen Kane of cat documentaries’, according to the publication IndieWire, as the poster points out. As soon as the screening starts, he’ll start the stopwatch hanging round his neck. After one hour, 16 minutes and 47 seconds, Xavi will know the credits are starting and they’ll last two and half minutes, so that the film screening will end when the stopwatch says one hour, 19 minutes and 14 seconds. ‘Before, with the 35 mm reels, you needed two people working in the cinema, one upstairs changing the reels and one downstairs seeing to the audience’, explains Escrivà, and he gets sidetracked by memories of the two cue dots at the end of a scene on the old films, which let the operator know when to make the change. Nowadays, as the films are delivered to his Maldà cinemas on Blu-ray optical disks or on external hard disks, you don’t need two people for each showing, just Xavi with his Geonaute stopwatch.

As an employee back in the late 70s at the old furniture shop in the Galeries Maldà (in Carrer del Pi), Xavi didn’t miss a single session of Friday cinema when he left work in the shop. At the beginning of the 80s he was offered the job of usher. ‘Great! I’ll see lots of films. And what’s more, free’, he thought. Later the projectionist left and Xavi trained for the necessary qualification to become the supreme commander, the man in charge of the screening, a post he took up in the mid-90s. Later he took the crown and began to take charge of the programmes for the cinemas.

So going to the cinema changed his life. ‘Every Friday, when my friends went to see Bud Spencer and Terence Hill films, I came here to see Visconti, Fellini or Bergman’, remembers Escrivà. ‘My friends were amazed, but the thing is the films they went to see said nothing to me. The other cinema, though, got through to me, even though I didn’t understand it at first’.

Escrivà has worked at running a cinema during the worst years films have been through (and are still going through) in our country. He started when people stopped going to the cinema because they now had a television at home. This was followed by the rise of the multiplexes, the ageing of the audiences that still went to first-run theatres (or neighbourhood cinemas, like his), the decline of the independent film circuit, gentrification of neighbourhoods like Ciutat Vella, where the Maldà is, with the subsequent loss of the younger residents, and, more recently, the crisis of 2008 and the increase in VAT on cinemas to 21% (like luxury articles), which was the final blow for small cinemas like his. Even so, the Maldà, which opened in 1945, is still alive: ‘The distributors take 50% of the price of a ticket, 21% goes on VAT, and when you add on what we have to pay the SGAE (Society of Authors), we’re up to 75%. The remaining 25% has to cover electricity, taxes, the three of us who work here…’, explains Xavi, as a drop of worry appears on his brow.

The survival of the Maldà is decided each year, after checking the books and making sure the cinema can stay open at least another twelve months. ‘Four years ago, we took a beating in the months of September, October and December, we had enormous losses. Then we launched the campaign ‘Salvem el Maldà’ (Save the Maldà) and issued patron’s cards and other discounts and we came through’, remembers Escrivà.

The problem at the Maldà is to do with the future of its customers. Years ago, its manager says, both young and old people came to the cinema, but now the typical cinema-goer has aged. ‘Eighty percent of our customer profile is made up of women between the ages of 40 and 60. Audiences aren’t being rejuvenated and that’s a problem’. Xavi insists I mention the Maldanins sessions in my article, for parents to take their children to the cinema. The only future for these cinemas is to get the young ones back.

His audience’s loyalty is an encouragement to Xavi. When he describes how he talks to people about the films he plans to put on or the ones they’d like him to put on, his face lights up and his tongue runs away with him. ‘When I switch the projector off and come down from the projection box, we start discussing the film together’. And once again we see trust at work. ‘A lot of people come without knowing what we’re going to screen, but trusting that whatever it is they’ll like it, and that’s very satisfying’, he finishes.

The Zumzeig cooperative, in the vicinity of Sants station, is at once a cinema and a bistro. Above these lines, the ticket office and the vestibule.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

Zumzeig, a cultural and social tool

Scheduling isn’t easy. Anna Brufau is a partner of the Zumzeig cooperative, a cinema and bistrot in the area of Sants station which as well as offering an impeccable selection of auteur cinema, hopes to become a social and cultural tool for the neighbourhood. ‘Our cinema has to work with the industry, but we want to do so in other ways’, Brufau says. This certainly isn’t an easy target, because, as she explains, to be able to screen films in Spain you have to pay on average about 200 euros a film in broadcasting rights and be backed by a distributor who can take on the costs of communication and advertising, as well as subsidising the rest of the regular costs. The fact that you have to pay the amount mentioned means only those people with money and an infrastructure behind them can afford to screen whatever they feel like.

The films Zumzeig schedules run for longer than at other cinemas. ‘Independent cinema needs more time’, says Brufau. ‘A lot of the films we show aren’t backed by a communication campaign and usually succeed through hearsay. So if it takes three months for people to come and see it, we keep it going that long’. This approach clashes head-on with the industry logic of the film screening business, which works like a bulldozer. ‘What the commercial distributors want – barely four or five of the ones operating in Barcelona are independent – is for the public to turn out en masse for their screenings, and if a title doesn’t work in the first ten days, they take it off and that’s it’, says Anna.

Every week about fifteen films are premiered in Spain. Out of these, Brufau says only one or two are of interest for showing at Zumzeig. ‘And then we might find that of these one or two are distributed by a large company, especially if they’ve been presented at an important festival like Cannes. In that case, our cinema may not be of interest to the distributor’. According to Brufau, it’s getting easier to see these films at the festivals than in cinemas.

And festivals are common and are more and more specialised. One of them that collaborates with the Filmoteca de Catalunya and with Zumzeig when it’s held in Barcelona is the CineMigrante. Set up in 2010 in Buenos Aires as a political and cultural space, ‘it arose from the need to demonstrate that the language of film is also nowadays relevant to the phenomenon of migration’, says Martina Bernabai, a member of the project.

CineMigrante, like Zumzeig, sets out to create shared spaces, especially in a historical context ‘in which migrations and their management by the institutions are a challenge to the construction (or rather deconstruction) of new societies’.

Anna Brufau, a member of the cooperative, before the start of a screening.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

Specialisation, though, isn’t the key to a project like Zumzeig, which is working to become a sort of cultural centre for the Sants and Hostafrancs neighbourhoods with the same object as CineMigrante: to transcend the cinema and become an instance of cinematographic but also political reflection that makes itself felt. ‘Specialisation goes against the idea of proximity’, says Brufau. ‘Of course, we want people from all over Barcelona to come, but we’re working to weave cooperation networks with other organisations in the neighbourhood, we try to make sure that audiences, art and ideas flow between the associations and, above all, we fight to break down the preconceived notion that these films are difficult to watch for most people in the neighbourhood’.

Working in committees helps. There’s a nuclear group that sees to scheduling and different committees with the time and the tranquillity to work on other important aspects of the project that call for fresh, creative ideas, such as the best way to educate people to combat the snob stigma of independent cinema, or the neighbourhood committee, which is directed at establishing relations with organisations and residents.

This philosophy of ‘neighbourhood construction’ is what the Zumzeig collective have tried to bring to the project in the last year, since they’ve been operating as a cooperative. Its owner, Esteban Bernatas, opened Zumzeig in 2013 and three years later he transferred the rights of use to the present cooperativists and retired to live in Paris. When asked about his models when he opened the cinema, Bernatas mentioned the ‘cultural exception’ that exists in France as compared to Spain. There it’s as though culture was part of a public asset that must be protected from an implacable neo-liberalism’. Brufau, on this point, says ‘We don’t want to be just a cinema; we carry out activities as a cultural centre and we show the films we show not for the financial returns we can get from them, but because we feel a duty to show them’. When asked why he followed the French model when he set up Zumzeig, Bernatas ventures that he may have borrowed from it in the type of schedule chosen, but that the idea of having a bar in the cinema is more like Berlin. ‘Although on second thoughts’ – Bernatas had visited his cinema a few weeks before answering that question – ‘I’d say that Zumzeig now is more Santsenc (from the Sants neighbourhood). A good sign.

For 112 years and 364 days, Barcelona’s Model prison took in those whom the social and legal ideals of different regimes had cut off from the collective, from that which is deemed acceptable, from the public sphere. Society, either by submission or inaction, accepts a contract: the state protects us from crime in return for the right firstly to decide what counts as crime and secondly to exercise a legitimate use of force and confinement.

Photo: Arianna Giménez

Until 10 January 2017, when the Catalan Government and the City Council signed the agreement to close the prison, nobody had believed this closure would actually happen, despite promises from Barcelona’s last three mayors. The Model prison has since been emptied of its prisoners – the last group left in a Catalan police force armoured van on 8 June. Now, for the residents in this part of the city (Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample), the two city blocks the premises encompass represent both an opportunity and a danger, as they watch to see what sort of restoration will be given to this large chunk of their neighbourhood, following four decades of calls for the prison’s closure in order to make way for amenities, green spaces and schools.

Used for pre-trial detentions – for prisoners without guilty verdicts – the Model prison is among the public institutions best equipped to tell us how the city of Barcelona experienced the 20th century. Its detainees have included people who stole (be it to put food on the table, to feed their addictions or just to satisfy their greed), people who dealt drugs (mostly people dealing in small amounts) and people who were at odds with the regime as regards their ideas and/or the political beliefs they expressed.

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia – educationalist and founder of the Escuela Moderna – was arrested in Barcelona in August 1909, accused of being one of the instigators of the riots and confrontations commonly known as the Tragic Week. On Saturday 9 October he was tried without due process by court martial in the auditorium of the Model prison, and condemned to death for military rebellion. When facing the firing squad in the Montjuïc cemetery on the morning of 13 October, standing rather than kneeling he shouted his final words “Long live the Escuela Moderna!”

Bulldozers preparing the ground for the portapacks for the Eixample I school last June on the part of the building demolished in 2015.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

The Eixample I school was inaugurated within the grounds of the old prison last September, coinciding with the start of the academic year. Locals in the Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample neighbourhood, having spent decades calling for the City Council and the Catalan Government to close the prison and open schools, amenities and green spaces in its place, now bring their children to be taught where the founder of the Escuela Moderna was condemned to death.

Jaume Asens is the fourth deputy to the mayoress of Barcelona and heads the council’s Citizens’ Rights, Participation and Transparency department. He invokes the words of Victor Hugo, that “he who opens a school door, closes a prison”. The doors of the Eixample I school are not as heavy as those of the Model prison were. Indeed, they are quite a lot lighter, as are the classrooms as a whole, consisting of huts installed in the part of the prison that was taken down under former mayor Xavier Trias in March 2015, on the corner formed by the streets Entença and Roselló. Diggers moved in at the start of July, and after they were done, a mural was left visible on the wall of the prison: “From the Model prison (1904-2017?) to a model for transformation, culture, cohesion, remembrance and neighbourhoods”.

For the Esquerra de l’Eixample Neighbourhood Association, the 2009 Master Plan for the Transformation of the Model Prison, which was designed in collaboration with neighbours and local businesses, remains valid. It envisages the creation of a primary school, a nursery school, a residence and day centre for senior citizens, an activity centre for young people, a sports centre, underground parking, a healthcare centre, a memorial to democracy and a green space – facilities urgently needed by a neighbourhood with almost nothing in the way of parks or schools.

Up until the opening of the Model prison, the city’s largest prison was one located on Carrer Reina Amàlia, in what is now Plaça de Josep Maria Folch i Torres in the Raval neighbourhood. It was a building that historically had been a convent for Paulist nuns, but was used as a prison as of 1839. In conditions of dire overcrowding and unsegregated yards and corridors, there was a mix of women, youths, children, elderly people, men who had been condemned, people awaiting trial, people who were ill and others about to become ill. The Model prison’s first inmates were the men from the Reina Amàlia prison, which continued to function as a women’s prison in dreadfully insanitary conditions up until the Spanish Civil War.

The Model Prison, surrounded by fields and empty plots in June 1904, when it was opened, though still unfinished.
Photo: AFB

However, the idea was that conditions in the new prison would be quite different. The Model prison was thus named because it was to be exemplary for its functional excellence. Building works based on the designs of architects Salvador Vinyals i Sabaté and Josep Domènech i Estapà began in 1887, the year before the Universal Exposition, but the prison was not inaugurated until 9 June 1904, and even then it was still unfinished. It was then surrounded by building plots, cabins and smallholdings, some distance from the Eixample district that at that time went no further than Carrer Balmes and would take another thirty years to reach Sants, making the Model an urban prison, the Barcelona jail.

It was the first Catalan prison to use the cell system, i.e. a space for each prisoner to sleep in individually. Furthermore, the Model prison was designed as a panopticon structure, based on the architectural principles of Jeremy Bentham. This meant that the central watch point gave a comprehensive view throughout all six of the galleries, which extended like the spokes of a wheel from the circular ‘hub’ building.

In comparison with overcrowded jails with shared cells, galley slavery or earlier customs of torture and public suffering, Barcelona’s new Model prison would not have seemed so bad. But the improvements were not arbitrary. The constant surveillance, the isolation, the discipline regarding work, meals and timetables, the control over prisoners’ bodies by the staff and the punishment quantified in terms of years sought not only to mould prisoners physically, but also to change them as individuals. As Michel Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish, “It [the prison] must be the most powerful machinery for imposing a new form on the perverted individual; its mode of action is the constraint of a total education”.

For the first time, Barcelona’s prisoners felt the gaze of constant surveillance resting upon them, while also being alone in their cells, unable to talk to anyone – unless they shouted – for hours on end, in a society that was still used to almost continuous verbal communication.

During the initial years the prisoners’ living conditions were not bad, indeed in many cases they were better than they would have expected in their lives on the outside. The Model prison was designed to house around 850 prisoners. The cells were no more than 9 square metres and were for one person, the prison meals provided enough sustenance for the minimal exertion demanded of prisoners in their isolated state, and illness was relatively infrequent thanks to vaccination campaigns and the work of the infirmary. However, this was a situation that would not last for long.

Prisoners at the mass for the La Mercè festivities in 1946.
Photo: Pérez de Rozas / AFB

A group of protestors demanding an amnesty, on the roof of the prison on 19 July 1977.
Photo: Pérez de Rozas / AFB

Political and social repression

As the city grew up around it, the Model prison received fewer and fewer resources to properly look after the inmates, despite being filled more and more densely with an increasingly diverse population. Not many years after it was opened, the regular prisoners began to see alongside them political prisoners – those seen as capable of destabilising the regimes of the time.

The Model prison thus became a symbol of repression and the people of the city began to associate it with government arrests – which required no more than a police order to incarcerate the person targeted – or with the so-called ‘ley de fugas’ (escapee law), an abhorrent trap where a prisoner would be released and then shot in the back immediately upon exiting the prison, under the allegation they were escaping – you can picture the scene at the main gate. After its initial years of being popularly referred to as ‘the tower’ or ‘the Carrer Entença hotel’, within a decade the prison had become one of the darkest symbols of repression, on a par with Montjuïc Castle and Camp de la Bota from the Franco era.

When Franco’s troops triumphantly entered Barcelona, towards the end of January 1939, the prison was close to being empty. But at nightfall of Thursday 26 January Barcelona was an occupied city and the Model prison was its primary detention facility. A special regime of occupation lasted until 1 August, while the state of war announced by the army – which had been led into insurgency against the legitimate Republic three years previously – carried on until April 1948. For those who were defeated, the night of 26 January 1939 was to last almost forty years.

According to a reconstruction of the official figures made by the authors of Història de la presó Model de Barcelona (History of Barcelona’s Model prison – an extensive book published in 2000 and re-edited just a few months ago), at the end of 1939 there were some 12,745 prisoners in the Model, living in awful conditions. The state of the facilities was disgraceful, the list of diseases affecting prisoners was endless, and political repression was without doubt the main reason behind most of the executions, which totalled 1,618.

The extent of prison overcrowding was a cause of concern for Franco’s government, who came up with a system for reducing sentences through work. Prisoners who were not guilty of violent crimes and demonstrated good behaviour could work on the outside or in the prison’s workshops; in exchange they received a small amount of pay and a reduction in their sentences of one day for every two days worked.

Photo: Arianna Giménez

Above, Gabriel Gómez remembers his father Helios’s stay in the Model prison. Helios Gómez was an anarchist illustrator, painter and poet who painted the murals in the so-called Gypsy Chapel, reproduced below for the exhibition ‘La Model ens parla. 113 anys, 13 històries’ (La Model talks to us. 113 years, 13 stories).
Photo: Arianna Giménez

Intellectual redemption

One afternoon in 1948, the driver for the Minister of Employment (José Antonio Girón de Velasco) entered the Arnáiz art gallery in Barcelona. There he found Helios Gómez, a graphic artist and designer, poet, journalist, supporter of civil liberties and anarchist, together with his five-year-old son, Gabriel. “The guy wore riding boots, a grey suit, silver-plated v-shaped buttons and a huge silver hat. He was like an admiral” recalls Gabriel, in the living room of his home, a room decorated with his father’s pictures and prints. The child was awestruck by the driver’s outfit, he was like a character out of a comic.

The driver took his father to see Girón de Velasco, the minister, who tried to convince Helios to work for the regime, without success. Helios Gómez (born in Seville in 1905) had already spent time in the Model in 1930 alongside figures such as Lluís Companys and Àngel Pestaña; he was also in refugee camps in France and Algeria after the Spanish Civil War and had returned to the same prison between 1945 and 1946. Ten years before, in 1936, he had founded the Trade Union of Professional Draughtsmen of Catalonia, which instigated the poster campaign against Franco’s Nationalists during the war. A document his son Gabriel found in an archive in Salamanca almost half a century later described him as a “prominent left-winger, a spreader of ideas”. Given that he refused to work for the regime, he was sent back to the Model prison a few days later.

Gabriel Gómez remembers the day his father went in; as it was the feast day of the Virgin of Mercy, the patron saint of prisoners, children were allowed in to see their fathers. “They didn’t have beds, just a few mattresses”, he recounts. Although the overcrowding of the prison was down on the 13,000 prisoners there in 1940, there were still over 2,505 inmates sharing its unhealthy living conditions, more than three times the amount the architects had envisaged.

Helios Gómez was sick when he left the Model prison in 1954 and died two years later. Gabriel Gómez has researched his father’s life and works extensively, an exercise that began when he saw Helios mentioned in something written by Teresa Pàmies. This led to him a meeting with his father’s fellow inmates, militants from the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). “They received me very warmly and answered everything I asked them about my father, even though they preferred talking to me about the history of this country nobody used to tell.”

Brother Bienvenido Lahoz arrived at the Model prison in 1941. Serving as its priest, he was a member of the Mercedarian Order and enjoyed holding intellectual debates with the political prisoners. Nevertheless, he also tended to give short shrift to arguments that were not to his liking. Knowledgeable of Helios Gómez’s artistic capabilities, Lahoz asked him to paint a chapel in the first cell on the first floor of the Model prison’s fourth gallery, just next to the cells for those condemned to death. The piece he completed in 1950 has at its centre the Virgin of Mercy – the patron saint of prisoners and of Barcelona, the latter title held jointly with Saint Eulalia – holding Jesus as a child, who has a paper pinwheel in his hand. At her feet there is a group of men in chains and on the opposite wall, where the door is, there is a chorus of angels. The authorities of the time would have liked the work even more had the men in chains not been portraits of his colleagues from the POUM, and if the main characters in the scene, including the Virgen, had not all had features characteristic of gypsies – a people Helios Gómez belonged to.

This space, known as the ‘Gypsy Chapel’, was painted over in white in 1998, while Núria de Gispert was in charge of the Catalan Government’s Ministry of Justice. Later, when Montserrat Tura was at the helm of the same department, the cell was closed off. Now, attempting to look in from outside you cannot even get a glimpse through a crack. Gabriel Gómez explains that thanks to help from SOS Monuments he managed to get in touch with the City Council architect to declare the large central inspection room – which connects directly with the chapel cell – as an element to be saved. Deputy Mayor Jaume Asens has provided assurances that the chapel will be protected, “The plan is to remove the paint that’s covering the mural and to preserve it.”

“We want to offer visual accounts of the suffering that occurred in the Model prison. It’s something that hasn’t been talked about that much, but in reality it’s one of our society’s most terrible places”, Jaume adds. In the process of deciding on future uses of the premises, the proposals on the table include one from the local authorities to create a history centre, and there is an idea from Helios Gómez’s son to permanently establish a museum of political art.

A new generation

Beginning in the 1950s, once the United States and the Vatican started opening the regime’s doors to the world, the Franco dictatorship was unable to maintain the harsh levels of repression seen previously. The political prisoners continued to arrive, but what with the reduced sentences for old-timers as well as remissions for good behaviour, the Model prison gradually became less crowded, going from 8,685 inmates in 1941 to 1,832 in 1955, and continuing with a relatively stable population from then onwards. Those who had been imprisoned in the immediate post-war period were replaced by a new generation, chiefly consisting of younger common criminals and, as of the 1970s, members of political groups that opposed Franco.

The dictatorship continued with its efforts to mould the morals of society both inside and outside of prisons. The 1954 reform of the so-called ‘Law on Vagrants and Wrongdoers’ – a law originally created during the Republican presidency of Manuel Azaña in 1933 – expanded the legislation to include homosexuality to the existing crimes of begging, nomadism and prostitution. Later, in 1970, the Law on Vagrants was replaced by the Law on Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation, which included activities such as dealing or consuming drugs, the sale of pornography, prostitution, pandering and illegal immigration as crimes that could incur prison sentences. And homosexuals did not benefit from the pardon of 25 November 1975 or the amnesties that came in the two years that followed. The Model prison had inmates who were there as a result of their sexual orientation until 1979.

With Franco on his last legs and the new law in force, the authorities began throwing in jail anyone they deemed to be a social or moral risk: political dissidents, people whose sexual and amorous lives were disapproved of, people suffering extreme poverty, gypsies with no fixed abode and, towards the end of the 1970s, people addicted to drugs. It was during the years in which political prisoners lived alongside regular prisoners that the latter group created COPEL (the Prisoners’ Struggle Cooperative) to demand the same amnesty that the political prisoners had received. Their view was that they had been imprisoned under the laws of Franco’s regime and therefore their incarceration was illegal under the new democratic regime. However, they were not successful. There were prison riots and later on, at the end of the 1970s, heroin was to have devastating effects.

Former prisoner Eduardo Borràs talks in this report.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

Daniel Rojo describes his stay in the Model Prison in this report.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

Accounts from inside

Daniel Rojo was held at the Model between 1981 and 1983, then again between 1984 and 1989, and finally between 1991 and 1993. He has been teetotal for over fifteen years and claims to have kicked eleven addictions, including heroin. Sitting in the entrance of a relatively fancy hotel near Plaça Molina he explains “those days really were bad; almost all the inmates were junkies and almost all of us had HIV”. With methadone treatments not introduced until the 1990s, the prisoners had to be very resourceful to get their hits. “A needle lasted us a month. We would file them down because with so much use they’d get broken or blocked, and so we had to stick wires in.”

When Rojo was first sent to the Model prison he was nineteen, had already robbed dozens of banks and had plenty to show for it. “I showed up in front of the prison officers with a Cartier gold chain with Dalí’s Christ on it and a Rolex Cadete. They told me to leave it all at the entrance, as inside it’d get stolen. I thought that if I left it there, I’d never see it again, but inside at least I could try to defend myself.” All Rojo wanted was to preserve his status.

He recalls how the prison officers were still very militarised. “High green boots, silver hat, stripes (silver for temporary staff, gold for those who were permanent),” Their relationship with the prisoners was not good. “If you treat a prisoner like a dog, he will behave like an animal”, Rojo summarises. He adds that if prisoners are made to go the toilet in a hole from which rats jump up to bite you, this likewise has a negative effect on behaviour.

The demilitarisation began with the new penitentiary law of 1979 and the handover of control to the Catalan Government in 1984, culminating eventually that decade with the introduction of psychologists, doctors of both sexes (as opposed to just male doctors beforehand) and the implementation of face-to-face and conjugal visits. Going into the 1990s, the introduction of methadone finally brought some calm after the Model prison’s most turbulent years. It was in those years that Jaume Asens began visiting the prison as a lawyer working only for legal aid (“for ideological reasons”, he clarifies). Politicians had then been promising and putting off the closure of the prison for quite some time. “Prison is for the poor; the criminal system has selective tendencies”, Asens points out. For the main part, visiting the prison he encountered poor people, sick people and drug addicts.

Even though the Catalan Government became the main competent authority for prisons, many laws are still made in Madrid. In 1995, the BOE (the Official State Gazette) published the new criminal code, the first in Spain’s new democracy. Since then it has been reformed some thirty times, lengthening sentences and adding justifications for sending people to prison, going so far even as ‘a permanently reviewable prison sentence’. According to a report from 2015 by ROSEP (the Network of Prison-Related Social Organisations), it is getting harder to apply alternatives that favour rehabilitation. In 1975 there were 8,440 people being held as prisoners in Spain; in February 2017 there were 60,203. ROSEP’s report concludes that around 60% of Spanish prisoners are imprisoned for crimes of medium-level seriousness (theft, robbery, drug dealing), offences that do not cause a high level of social alarm and would be better dealt with by measures that did not lock the culprits away.

At the turn of the new century Eduardo Borrás was sent to the Model prison, accused of robbery. There he was at times living in a cell with four other people. After a year and a half he was sentenced and transferred to Brians prison. “In the Model prison you quickly get burned out. Some day the prison officers might come into your cell looking for chocolate, and if they didn’t find any they’d strip you naked, as well as completely messing up your cell”, he recalls. Meanwhile Francesc López, who worked as a prison officer there for twelve years, laments the fact there are still some people who could believe the current officers work like those of Franco’s regime.

What is in store

In January this year, a week after the final agreement to close the Model prison was signed, the owner of the building at 151 Carrer Entença began rescinding the residents’ contracts, saying they would not be renewed and putting the flats up for sale online. Since then the residents have got together and have been protesting to the City Council in search of a solution. The owner has been closing the flats up with metal sheeting each time he manages to force a resident out.

Press conference with tenants threatened by speculation in the vicinity of the Model prison. The man with his arm raised is Joan Gómez.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

There is just one resident whose contract is not temporary: Joan Gómez, who is retired, and who takes care of receiving the media on behalf of the residents’ collective in his small living room on the first floor. There on his table he has laid out all the press coverage they have been given, and with clarity and precision he explains their alternatives. “Either the City Council buys the building – which is unlikely as it’s a private owner and not a bank – or we create a housing cooperative to manage the rents.”

While he sees himself as someone with left-wing politics, Joan and his neighbours had never been such a community until the fax messages started arriving telling them to leave. “I’ve been living here since 1981. For years we’ve been calling for the prison to be closed and now that we’ve got there, a load of new problems come up. Off go the prisoners and down come the vultures”, Joan sums up. Jaume Asens is proposing to combat gentrification by building social housing apartments in the part of the Model prison premises that runs along Carrer Nicaragua, where for a time there was talk of creating a hotel. The neighbours’ associations are voicing their support for this, reiterating that there has to be a greater balance between public and private supply.

A group of residents having their photograph taken outside the entrance to the prison the day before it closed.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

The Model prison was an obsolete facility. Amand Calderó, Director of the Catalan Government’s Penitentiary Services, states that it would have been necessary to spend 25 million euros in order to bring all its areas into line with current prison requirements. As such, an agreement to close it was made with three of the five trade unions (the two who would not sign being UGT and ACAIP). As well as working at the Model prison, Francesc López is also a member of the prison workers’ trade union ACAIP. The Model prison is the only prison in Catalonia where this trade union has majority representation, and the feeling among its members is one of disillusion. “For years they’ve been promising to build a pre-trial detention centre in Zona Franca, but in the end we haven’t been able to choose where we’ll go next”.

López entered in 2005 “with 2,100 inmates” and is certain that the prison could have continued operations until the promised open prison and pre-trial detention centre in Zona Franca were ready. However, the agreement between the City Council and the Catalan Government gives opening dates of 2021 for the open prison and 2025 for the pre-trial detention centre, with construction costs of €35 million and €75 million, respectively. In this agreement, from 2009, the authorities agree to allocate the land in Zona Franca in order to close Barcelona’s two other prisons: the Wad-Ras women’s prison and the Trinitat Vella open prison. Calderó says that the €35 million to build the new open prison have already been ring-fenced. It remains to be seen what can be gained from the land at Trinitat Vella in addition to the €5.5 million the City Council has already paid for the construction of social housing apartments, as the complete lot is yet to be made available.

The issue – which the Director of Penitentiary Services is not overly concerned about – is that if over the course of fifteen years nothing is built in Zona Franca, the City Council recoups the land. Prison officer Francesc López is clear about what he thinks will happen. “If they’ve managed to put all the pre-trial prisoners in Brians 1, that’s where they’ll stay, and at Zona Franca they’ll only build the open prison. They’ll take the women from Wad-Ras to Brians 1, too, as there’s a large women’s section there. That way they’ll save money.”

Covering distances

Prisoners’ families living in Barcelona or its immediate perimeter were the first to feel a negative impact from the change. They are forced to choose between finding a private vehicle to get to the prison, taking a bus from Sants station, or getting a train to Martorell and then a bus from there. In any case, the amount of time and money they have to spend on travel has risen dramatically.

As for the problem of transport for the defendant’s legal representatives, Penitentiary Services signed an agreement with the Bar Association in order to establish a telematic communications system. So far, eight conference rooms have been installed at Brians 1. These are a distant cry from the rooms provided for legal visits that Jaume Asens remembers, “which were significantly worse than what you see in the movies”. The lawyer and the client could make contact visually but not physically, and had to talk through a grille surrounded by the din of other people’s shouting.

The Deputy Mayor has concerns about whether lawyers working for legal aid who live or work in Barcelona are going to make the effort to travel to see their clients. “They’re poorly paid” he claims. “It was clear back in my day that not enough was done to help inmates, especially after the trial.”

Calderó gives his assurances that the closure of the Model will not entail overcrowding problems in the rest of the prisons. In fact, he describes it as an opportunity to reorganise the prison system to scale with the city and country. “We didn’t want to jump off the deep end. When the Model prison was open, Catalan prisons were at 67% of their capacity; once it closed the figure went up to 73%” says Calderó, re-checking his figures on a printout. “The forecast is for Brians 1 to go down from 85% to 71% in September.” At the ACAIP the talk is not so much of the deep end as it is of Russian roulette. “In the [Catalan Government Justice] Department they knew that neither the prisoners nor us employees would be in agreement with the change, and that problems could arise.” In the end there was no strike and tensions did not rise, with the exception of the odd altercation with a prison officer and a young prisoner climbing onto the roof in March.

After so many years, one question to ask is what has the prison done for the city? Has it cut the number of repeat offenders? Has it achieved greater success with prisoner rehabilitation? Things have gone very well for Daniel Rojo since he left the Model prison and he is happy to talk about his time behind bars, although he admits that rehabilitation is very difficult. “When I got out, I had no kind of training whatsoever. I could rob banks, I knew how to do that very well, but not much else. Work, love and family: if you’ve got those three things, everything else in life is easier.” Or perhaps it would be worth discussing social options to obviate the inequality that results from having been to prison and the permanent mark this leaves on people. Eduardo Borrás’ face takes on a sad look as he thinks back upon his time in the Model prison. Sipping on a can of citrus-flavoured water, he recalls how when he was inside he had the urge to send letters of complaint about the prison conditions “as far as the Pope in Rome”, but as soon as he left he simply thought “so long guys”.

Amand Calderó, the Director of Penitentiary Services, claims that seven out of every ten inmates do not reoffend, “but we can’t be content with just that; there’s still a lot of work to do.” At the other end of a telephone line, speaking from his office, Jaume Asens remembers the Model prison as place with people living side by side in an atmosphere that was “hostile, stigmatising, infantilising and preventive of personal autonomy”. And Foucault (in the same work cited earlier) maintains that “prison cannot fail to produce delinquents. It does so by the very type of existence that it imposes on its inmates: whether they are isolated in cells or whether they are given useless work, for which they will find no employment.”

One of the prison blocks and its cells turned into a gallery for the exhibition ‘La Model ens parla. 113 anys, 13 històries’, which can be visited as part of the open doors event that goes on until November.
Photo: Arianna Giménez

Selfies in the cells

Although he had never entered the Model prison, Francesc remembers when he demonstrated in front of it in support of Lluís Maria Xirinacs, who stood in front of the prison for twelve hours every day for almost two years during the transition to democracy, calling for an amnesty for political prisoners. Today – 5 July 2017 – this sturdy man with agile fingers and white hair is out with fellow members of the Watercolourists’ Collective of Catalonia; they are on one of their Wednesday excursions to paint the city, this time coming to the patio where the prisoners used to do sports. One of his companions remarks “you’ll soon see how the painting is prettier than it really is”. To one side of them, busy moving furniture that is to be sent to other prisons are workers from the CIRE (Centre for Rehabilitation Initiatives), inmates from various open prisons who are paid minimum wage.

If like Francesc and his watercolourist friends you would like to experience the Model prison, anyone can sign up and book a visit to see the most symbolic parts of the premises as well as the exhibition “The Model Prison talks to us. 113 years. 13 stories”, commissioned by Agustí Alcoberro, which is part of a series of open-doors day events that is running until November.

The residents wander through the fifth gallery, the cells of which have been decorated to tell their respective stories. Some of them are using selfie sticks to photograph themselves in front of the cell that describes the prison riots in the time of El Vaquilla (a famous criminal who was at the Model prison in the second half of the 1970s). The room is a mess, with mattresses, chairs and blankets, and dirt and misery. Opposite it is a recreation of one of the original cells of 1904, designed for a single prisoner, clean and exemplary, something like the cell where Ferrer i Guàrdia would have awaited his death sentence.

Beside Francesc – who has finished his watercolour, which is indeed prettier than the reality it reflects – an open prison inmate who now has to go to Brians prison every night to sleep signals around him and points out “They’ve left this looking very nice, but don’t fall for it, the Model prison wasn’t like this.” On the way out of the premises, past the three security gates and in the outer courtyard, the Justice Department has set up a small stand – something like a museum shop – where you can by baskets, bags, notebook, towels, fabrics and so on, all manufactured by prisoners. On the labels of these products it says: “Made in CIRE”.

Historical narratives from the time of Spain’s Transition to Democracy have sometimes ignored the role of social movements and particularly the importance of women in residents’ and workers’ movements. The four life stories we present exemplify how women activists are marginalised because they belong to the working class, they are women and, in some cases, they are migrants.

A demonstration by the cleaning staff of the Hospital de Bellvitge, organized by the trade union Comisiones Obreras, to demand improvements to working conditions; Via Laietana, 1986.
Photo: Lluís Salom

Paqui Jiménez played a prominent role in one of the landmark workers’ struggles of the final period of the Franco regime: the Harry Walker strike. Maruja Ruiz, chairperson of the La Prosperitat Casal de la Gent Gran (a day-care centre for older persons), was one of the organisers of a lock-in by women and children at the church of Sant Andreu de Palomar, in 1976, in solidarity with their husbands and fathers, who were on strike at the Motor Ibérica factory. Llum Ventura is a councillor for the district of Ciutat Vella and one of the founders of the association Les Dones del 36 (The women of 1936), which has worked to commemorate the women of the Spanish Civil War. Hotel chambermaids, one of the most ignored and badly treated labour collectives of our time, are represented through the testimony of Rosmery.

“Willy, we’re being followed”, I said to Willy, although in reality that wasn’t his name.

“Don’t wind me up, Ana”, he must have replied, though that wasn’t my real name either.

It was 1970 and our bus was travelling along Virrei Amat. A few days previously, the women who worked at the Harry Walker factory had gone on strike. I was one of them. I had collected the addresses of all my striking workmates and I was so scared that the papers with their addresses on would be found that I decided to hide them in my knickers, wrapped in plastic and fabric, like a sanitary pad.

“Ana, we’re being followed.” Willy became so nervous he got off the bus and left me on my own. We all have moments of panic and by then the police had already arrested one or two of our colleagues. And they had hurt them quite badly. So I stayed on the bus until the very last stop, in Trinitat Vella, and then I ran and I ran, seeking refuge at the home of some priests who were friends of mine.

“Do what you like, but I’m sleeping here tonight”, I said, and so I did. I was so scared when I got off that bus on Via Júlia: the bloke who was following me nearly caught me, but I ran and I ran.

Paqui Jiménez, who played a leading role in one of the landmark strikes of the final years of the Franco regime, at the Harry Walker automotive factory, 1971.
Photo: Albert Armengol

Ana’s real name is Paqui Jiménez and she was born in Baeza (Jaén) in 1946. For decades now she’s been living in a small flat in L’Esquerra de l’Eixample, where she’s recalling those times in a calm, clear voice, surrounded by countless house plants.

One street away from Via Júlia lies the Casal de la Gent Gran (a day-care centre for older persons) for the La Prosperitat neighbourhood. Maruja Ruiz, its chairperson, was born in Guadix, Granada, in 1936. She is a veteran community activist. I ask her how many times she had ended up in police custody. “Well, kid… Many times, I can’t even remember, but I was always released… The day we protested about the bogus building on Via Favència we were put in a cell with two blokes who were suffering from withdrawal symptoms. A neighbour was with me, and he was scared out of his wits because he’d been arrested; he was crying and everything. One of the junkies was banging his head against the wall and shouting… That neighbour who was with me must still be around here, I think… I never heard any more from him!” Maruja, with her sky blue eyeshadow, hair perfectly backcombed, laughs at the memory.

Llum Ventura is a councillor for the district of Ciutat Vella and was born in Poble-Sec, Barcelona, in 1941. “I was born into a family of anarchists: always on the losing side, but very committed. I had a tough childhood; I was almost entirely ignored as a little girl. But one day a relative of ours who ran a hairdressing salon in the neighbourhood started calling on me to help her wash hair. Later, I set up my own salon in my flat, on the seventh floor.”

Llum Ventura, a district councillor for Ciutat Vella and one of the instigators of the project to preserve the historical memory of the role of women during the Spanish Republic and Civil War, through the Les Dones del 36 association.
Photo: Albert Armengol

In 1979, in a new but fragile democracy, Llum Ventura opened another salon called La Mar, right near the Picasso Museum. It was a small space with a little library for the women of the neighbourhood, with not a single gossip magazine, and Llum offered information on how to get an abortion: “Once a month, Françoise, a woman from Toulouse, would come to perform clandestine abortions.”

Rosmery’s fingernails are very pointy, like those of all the hotel’s chambermaids. Apparently, the constant contact with fabric, sheets and towels makes your nails as sharp as knives. If you get distracted and they rub against your skin you’d cut yourself, and you can’t let that happen. Rosmery’s boss runs a tourist apartment and gives her just half an hour to clean it from top to bottom. She doesn’t even have time to complain: “In high season, we might not even have one day off. We hardly get to see our own families; we get home just in time to have dinner and go to bed and up again the next day to go to work”, she pushes up her glasses and takes a much-needed moment’s pause. “It’s like slavery: we don’t have a life.” Rosmery has had to stop working because she suffers from epicondylitis (an injury more commonly known as tennis elbow), but she has barely two months of unemployment benefit remaining. If it were not for the help of the Las Kellys chambermaids’ association, Rosmery would be left completely defenceless. Her injury has not even been recognised as a work-related condition.

Multiplied marginalisation

The historical narrative of Spain’s Transition to democracy, according to historian Cristina Borderías, has for a long time ignored the role of social activism and, even more, the historical significance of women as regards community-based and workers’ struggles. The life stories of these four women are just a small sample of an enormous, perverse reality; that of the double (and even triple) marginalisation of working women, of spirited women. The official narrative has locked them out of its memory because they belong to the working class, they are women and they are migrants.

The fingernails of the women working in the Catalan textile industry must have been as sharp as those of today’s chambermaids. “The Industrial Revolution happened in Barcelona because of women”, says the historian Isabel Segura. After the introduction of the steam engine, factories began to modernise and the whole structure of Barcelona changed. In modern homes, kitchens had only one door and space for only person: a woman, of course. Domestic work was unpaid and the husband’s wage was not enough to feed the family. The woman would have to work in the home and in the factory. For example, in the mid 19^th century, a woman living in Sants would patch up her family’s tattered clothes and not charge for it, but she would also get up at five in the morning to go to work at the Güell, Ramis y Cia textile factory – the Vapor Vell, the largest textile factory in Spain at that time – and she would weave and weave for twelve hours for a meagre wage, even less than what a man would earn for doing the same job.

The factory was in operation from 1846 to 1890 and three-quarters of its employees were women. Its proprietor, Joan Güell (Torredembarra, 1800) got rich in Cuba, where he monopolised the entire textile market of Havana. There are unconfirmed suspicions that part of his fortune came from the slave trade. It’s no surprise that activist groups in Sants, which were behind the conversion of this and other old factories in the neighbourhood into public amenities, have covered over the street name of Carrer de Joan Güell, on the wall of the factory, and replaced it with Carrer de les Dones del Vapor Vell (Women of the Vapor Vell). The struggle to turn the spotlight away from the upper classes to the working classes in the historical narratives on the construction of Barcelona often starts with a comprehensive and egalitarian review of street names.

It has never been easy for women to balance their two working lives (domestic and paid employment) with an active role in social movements. As well as the obvious problem of having the time, many male factory workers did not like the idea of working alongside women. They felt that the job was being degraded by the fact that a woman was doing it and that this led to lower wages, explains Nadia Varo, a historian: “These things were happening right when jobs were in short supply. There were attempts to expel them from the employment market, they were prevented from working as apprentices and there was never any question that their wages should be much lower.”

Historically, women were also not helped by the opinions of some of the socialist and anarchist intellectuals of the second half of the 19^th century. The ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the fathers of anarchist ideology, were nothing short of cruel. Proudhon saw the home and domestic work as a woman’s natural place. It’s worth saying that this was not the general view of revolutionary thinkers and that Friedrich Engels, for example, put forward much more acceptable ideas in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.”

A large demonstration through the centre of Barcelona, demanding an amnesty for the women, 1977.
Photo: Pilar Aymerich

According to data collected by Isabel Segura and presented in her book Dones de Sants-Montjuïc, itineraris històrics (Women of Sants-Montjuïc: historical itineraries), in 1905 Barcelona’s textile industry as a whole employed over 5,000 men, almost 16,500 women and just over 5,000 children in poor working conditions and with working hours that often did not even comply with the labour laws in force since 1873, when the working day was set as eleven hours a day. The year 1905 was also the year that textile worker and anarchist Teresa Claramunt (Sabadell, 1862) published La mujer. Consideraciones generales sobre su estado ante las prerrogativas del hombre (Women. General thoughts on their condition in the face of the prerogatives of men), one of the groundbreaking texts of feminist anarcho-syndicalism in Spain. Previously, Claremunt had, in 1889, set up Spain’s first feminist organisation, the Autonomous Women’s Society of Barcelona (SAMB). Arrested as a result of the attacks on the Corpus Christi procession of 1896, Claramunt went into exile in England until 1898, although she was never officially convicted of any crime. In 1902 she took part in the February general strike and was again arrested during Tragic Week ( a week of violent clashes between the Spanish army and the working classes), which occurred in Barcelona in 1909. Teresa Claramunt died on the eve of the 1931 municipal elections and was buried on 14 April 1931, the same day that the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed.

“Liberate married women from the workshop”

The Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship halted any signs of women’s progress, emancipation or liberty. Franco’s labour laws, the Fuero del Trabajo, were passed in 1938 and promised to “liberate married women from the workshop and factory”. Marriage was declared to be “once only and indissoluble”, according to another of the basic laws that underpinned the dictatorship, the Fuero de los Españoles (1945). Abortion and disseminating contraceptive practices became a criminal offence in 1941, and maternity was seen as a biological and Christian duty, as put forward by Pilar Primo de Rivera, head of the women’s section of the Falange political party from 1937 to 1977: “Women’s real duty to the Nation is to form families with a solid foundation of austerity and joy, families in which they foster all that is traditional.” And if women wanted to work, they needed their husband’s permission.

Despite this, the battered economy of the post-Civil War period could not afford for millions of women to not work – the textile industry was one of several that had collapsed – and, as such, plans to “liberate women from the workshop” were to fall by the wayside. These were years of silent struggle, years that district councillor Llum Ventura remembers as “the time of hush, hush, don’t talk about that”.

Demonstration outside La Trinitat women’s prison to demand that the nuns, of the order of Cruzadas Evangélicas de Cristo Rey, who were in charge of the prisoners, be replaced by professional prison guards; that prisoners be allowed to read legal texts, speak in their own language and wear their own clothes; along with other demands. 1976.
Photo: Pilar Aymerich

It’s not the first time that Ventura has worked for the local authority. Sipping on her cortado coffee, one can see the nostalgia in her eyes as she recalls her time as an independent councillor under Pasqual Maragall: “I was much further to the left, but I accepted the position so I could work on projects like commemorating the women of the Spanish Civil War, known as Les dones del 36 [the women of 1936]”. She travelled to Madrid, asking for names. In Barcelona, she visited women who were members of the Communist party, the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), but she was particularly keen to make contact with an anarchist woman, as her mother and aunt had been (also called Llum). “I had to tell the people in the CGT [the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the General Confederation of Labour] that my name was Llum and that my mother’s was Llibertat, and that the commemoration project could not go ahead without a female anarchist.” So it was that she met Concha Pérez, a libertarian and anarchist who had been held for several months at the women’s prison on Calle de la Reina Amàlia: “It was through that project and, in particular, through meeting Concha, that I returned to my libertarian roots and values.” The “hush, hush” was over.

Memories don’t last if they are not passed on. Ventura and the women of ’36 set up an association and went into primary and secondary schools, keeping the memories alive and passing them on to the younger generations. They gave a talk on Montjuïc for the twentieth anniversary of the first Catalan Women’s Conference, held at the University of Barcelona in 1976.

Women in movement(s)

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of that conference, the City Council set up a project called “En moviment[s]. Dones de Barcelona. 40 anys i més… 1976-2016” (In Movement(s). Women of Barcelona. 40 years and more… 1976-2016). The project will continue until July and it includes exhibitions, panel discussions, events at Cinefórum and the publication of a text written by historian Cristina Borderías, the project commissioner: “The project came about because we have a local government that is more open to these issues and because, in recent years, we have seen a growth in the feminist movement. The initiative has been well-received by feminist groups, which is not always the case with projects launched by the authorities. There is a stronger connection now between the feminist movement and the city administration”, says Borderías.

The pro-democracy and anti-Franco activism of the women of that time remains solid, even if the memory of what they did has been left to one side. “Women had a presence in trade unions, political parties and community associations, but they were denied access to management roles and not given any representation in these organisations”, Borderías explains in the book written for the “En Moviment[s]” exhibition. It was this commitment that drove Paqui Jiménez and her colleagues at the Harry Walker automotive company to go on strike during the dictatorship, at a time when such action was completely illegal.

What was it like to work in that factory? Paqui Jiménez explains in detail: “The carburettors would come and, using these hard, fine blades, we would remove the burrs. There were almost twenty of us women working on a production line. It was really tough: when I went to the toilet, my legs would buckle from the effort I’d had to put in. If we didn’t earn the productivity bonus, the wage was just not enough. We’d work from 6.00 in the morning until 2.00 in the afternoon, with 18 minutes for a mid-morning snack. The men had very basic jobs, they’d work on the shift and get splashed with this kind of oil that burned your hands. The bosses would put the most strong-minded women there. I’d protest. I didn’t want to go there.” Paqui grimaces, bites her tongue but finally opens up. “I’d curse the boss and he’d refuse. He was this illiterate bloke, a loser, a lout who treated woman like pigs… I would stand up to him, I scared him and in the end he would take me off the shift.”

During the dictatorship, the masculinisation of women was a constant, says Nadia Varo, a historian specialising in the role of women in the workers’ struggles organised by the Workers’ Commissions (CC.OO.) at that time. “Women were victimised when they suffered as a result of the working conditions, but when they took a strong role in an actual conflict they were masculinised and seen as male workers.” This was done out of fear that the male workers would not accept women as comrades in arms.

“They kept on increasing the amount of work we had to do to get the bonus”, recalls Paqui Jiménez, “and we just couldn’t do it, it was impossible. People were really wound up. The management threatened to sack some particularly militant colleagues and it was then, in 1971, that we set up the Harry Walker’s workers committee and went on strike. We’d meet in secret. I remember getting up at three in the morning to go and throw leaflets down into the entrance of the Santa Eulàlia metro station. It was all very quick, we’d throw them down and run off to get to work at the factory for 6 am. That way, if anything happened, I could always say that I had gone to work.”

Maruja Ruiz, one of the women who organized the protest by the wives of Motor Ibérica workers, now Chairperson of the Casal de la Gent Gran de la Prosperitat, a day centre for the elderly.
Photo: Albert Armengol

Historian Cristina Borderías explains that it was through the workers’ struggle that many women discovered “the limitations of individual action and the need to mutually support each other”. Paqui Jiménez is more explicit and recalls that when she got into those circles “her eyes were opened as big as saucers”. For Maruja Ruiz, community activism also means solidarity, unity and cooperation: “You have no idea how much one has to lose!”, Maruja scolds the youth of today. “I get goosebumps just thinking about you having to go through what we did… Goosebumps!”

The sit-in at Motor Ibérica

“My husband spent thirteen years working at the Motor Ibérica plant [which produced vehicles and machinery] and they fired him for leading a strike. It was 1976, the same year people were asking for the labour amnesty. So I spoke at the neighbourhood assembly and said that I could mobilise the wives of the workers”, says Maruja Ruiz, exuding self-confidence. “We tried to get them to take notice, but there was no way, so in the end we decided to stage a sit-in.” To mobilise the women, Maruja went to the Vertical Syndicate, the only trade union allowed in Franco’s Spain. “I went to the union and I told the men that we’d have an assembly with the women. I called the women. When I had the group set up, quite a nice group, we decided to lock ourselves in (the women and the children). We looked for somewhere central, the church of Sant Andreu de Palomar. What’s now the town hall of the Sant Andreu district, opposite the church, was then a health centre, and we thought it would be a good thing to have it so close just in case one of the kid’s got ill. And the metro was just a short way away, and the Pegaso, Maquinista and Fabra i Coats factories were also really close by. So it was easy for people to follow the sit-in.”

In June 1976, a large group of wives of workers at the Motor Ibérica factory, staged a sit-in at the church of Sant Andreu de Palomar together with their children, in a show of support for the strike their husbands were holding. They were forcibly removed by the police after 28 days.
Photo: Pilar Aymerich

When Maruja Ruiz gets going, it’s impossible to stop the flow of memories. “The priest, name of Camps, was very wary because the CNT people [the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the National Labour Confederation] had also locked themselves in there at one point and had left the place like a pigsty. I promised him that we would fix anything that we broke. So we got in. I brought a stove and some milk, not much, because I thought we’d get thrown out the day after. No-one imagined that we’d last 28 days.” More than 250 women and children took part. “We’d block the door with statues of saints to stop the police coming in at night.” But, in the end, come in they did.

“We knew that something was cooking when they opened up the factory and the bastard strikebreakers went back to work”, explains Maruja. She eyes the audio recorder, hesitates for a moment and finally says: “Bah, it doesn’t matter anymore if anyone knows”, and continues her story. “When the police came, we started tolling the bells to summon people and the square filled with people who came to stop the eviction. I told my workmates that we should wear our Motor Ibérica jackets with nothing underneath. I had been fined by Motor Ibérica for wearing their work clothes without being a member of staff, so I guessed that the police would tell us to remove our jackets. There was one of us, Julia, who had boobs like melons… when the police came through the courtyard at three in the afternoon, breaking everything in their path, they shouted: ‘Remove your jackets!’ But when they saw those boobs they changed their minds and shouted ‘Put on your jackets!’”

At this point Maruja Ruiz cannot contain her laughter and loses track of the story. That’s how she talks, in fragments and going off on tangents. “I’ve got everything ready for Carnival. Can you imagine fifty-odd eighty-year-old grannies dressed as rats? With little tails and everything… we’re going on the neighbourhood parade.” Maruja descends the stairs of the day-care centre nimbly and purposefully. She rests her hand on the bannister, but she has no need of the support.

“We spent seventeen years fighting to get this day-care centre. They were going to put up a block of flats on this site, and we would dismantle the crane every night. I think Josep Porcioles was the mayor at the time…” Dates and names get a little mixed up in her head, but she doesn’t mind, because she’s more interested in the stories than the figures. “When Jordi Pujol [the then President of the Catalan Regional Government] came to open the day centre, I told him he was seventeen years late.”

The historian Isabel Segura explains that “there is no division between the neighbourhood association movement and the feminist movement, because the feminist movement was directly involved in the demands for improvements to the neighbourhood. If, for example, there was a shortage of school places, it would be a couple of mums, fed up of travelling miles every day, who would decide to take action”. Women organised themselves into networks: that’s why they were not so boxed into solid structures, Segura recalls. “When conflict arose, the women created a network, other activists joined them and in the end it would end up being the men who were the public face of the demonstrations.”

The enemy within

Despite this, too often the women who have taken part in social movements in Barcelona have found the enemy within their own ranks. “At the time, society was much more chauvinistic than it is now, and the people who took part in these actions were also very sexist. They were part of society and they reproduced its models”, explains Nadia Varo. Not all of them truly defended an equal society, even if they were good at paying lip service to it.

Paqui Jiménez remembers that, during the Harry Walker strike, she twice went to sleep at a flat in Besòs. “We all slept on the floor, and there was one guy who’d move in on me and touch me. ‘Hey, please don’t touch me’, I protested. And he’d answer: ‘Paqui, you’re frigid. If you want to be a fighter for workers’ rights you have to be sexually liberated.’ And I’d say: ‘I’ll liberate myself when and with whom I want. But don’t think you can come and grope me in the middle of the night, because I’m not having it. And if that’s being frigid, then that’s what I am and that’s the end of it.’”

The living room is pervaded by the smell of the stew she cooked a little while ago. The former Harry Walker employee seems sad when she remembers these situations. “Chauvinism has always existed, and when you had to suffer it up-close, it seemed like there was no other option but to just lump it…” If these things happened between colleagues, one can only imagine the behaviour of the police under General Franco. She explains how “they called you a whore, they called you everything under the sun, and said that you should be at home cleaning…”

It was a learning experience for Paqui Jiménez. “I learned about the unity of the working class, the sense of working class pride. Really important ideas that people don’t think about nowadays. Working-class consciousness gave me the strength to carry on. There was great camaraderie in the factory, although there were one or two scabs too… Once, one of them got five kilos of paint thrown over her head: I felt bad about that, I really did”, the sad look on her face is clear. “I wouldn’t have been able to do that, but at the time, deep down, you felt like she deserved it, that she was asking for it… And anyway, she was as thick as two short planks stuck together, she just didn’t get it.”

Being a working woman changed her too. “I discovered what it meant to be a woman in that society. I learned that you can say no, that we had the same rights as anyone else, and that if we women stood together, we could win. Oh, yes! And I discovered financial independence. Because my family was poor, I gave all my wages to my mum and I could see that if I wanted to leave home, I couldn’t depend on a man. That was the biggest liberation I’ve felt in my life. You men, especially when you’re young, can’t even imagine what that feels like.”

It wasn’t easy for Maruja Ruiz: “Because I was always hither and thither, surrounded by men all day, some people thought I was a prostitute and that’s what they told me when I brought male colleagues to a clandestine meeting for the first time.” One of the workers at Motor Ibérica tried to make his wife leave the sit-in, but she refused. “She had seen what solidarity meant and she cried as she told us that she was not leaving.” She didn’t leave, and her husband reported her to the police for abandoning their children, then he took them away. The story has a happy ending, or maybe a predictable one: he ended up giving the children back to his wife because they were too much work.

A group on the margins

Rosmery only has two months of unemployment benefit left and she worries about how she will feed her children in the future. Isabel Cruz, a member of the Las Kellys chambermaids’ organisation, points to outsourcing services as one of the biggest problems that apartment chambermaids have to face. “The fact that they are not on the hotel’s payroll, but on that of a subcontracted company, means lower wages, excessive workloads and reduced workers’ rights.”

Chambermaids, marginalised because they are working class, female and, often, migrants, have very few resources to improve their working conditions. “They suffer a lot of stress, and because they are scared to ask for sick leave, they end up self-medicating”, explains Isabel Cruz. Prozac and ibuprofen to treat the impossibility of resting as they should or of having the family life they deserve. “There are cases of chambermaids who, at eight months pregnant, are spending their days making beds and moving mattresses.”

“Barcelona is an all-year tourist destination. How is it possible that all these chambermaids have temporary or zero-hours contracts? The only explanation is that the business owner knows full well that the worker will end up getting ill because of the working conditions she’s subjected to”, says Isabel Cruz. “In our association we have several cases of workers who have been sacked for taking sick leave, or chambermaids on zero-hours contracts who are told on one day not to come back for the next: these dismissals cost very little for business owners”, she explains.

The social movements of the Transition period fought for a more just and equal city. But on the margins of society, where we find the Las Kellys workers, there is not a trace of justice or equality.