In 1937, at the height of the Spanish civil war, Barcelona’s citizens hurriedly began the construction of air-raid shelters in anticipation of the bombardment that had already been unleashed on Madrid and, most notoriously, Guernica.
Within a year they had built more than 1,000 refuges, a feat celebrated in a photographic exhibition that has opened in the city’s now defunct La Modelo prison.
The exhibition, 1,322 Refugios Antiaéreos de Barcelona, brings together 170 evocative images of 40 of these shelters taken by the photographer Ana Sánchez. It was curated by the social historian Xavier Domènech.
“It’s an underground reflection of the city in 1937,” says Sánchez, who spent three years researching and photographing the shelters. “The refuges were sealed off in 1939 and so they’ve remained suspended in time.”
Sánchez’s work was not easy. In some shelters she could only stay a few minutes at a time for lack of oxygen, in others she worked waist-deep in water.
The design of the shelters typically uses the classic and resilient Catalan vault, the same technique used by the Valencian architect Rafael Guastavino when he designed New York’s Grand Central station.
Each tunnel is built in a zigzag so that, if a bomb penetrated, the shrapnel would only reach a small area, Sánchez explains.
Of the 1,322 known shelters, 85% were built by local communities, especially in poor neighbourhoods such as Ciutat Vella, Sants and Gràcia, where there was a strong tradition of collective action. The remainder were in factories or private homes. Two, one on Montjuïc and the other in the Plaça del Diamant in Gràcia, are open to the public.
The work was coordinated by the engineer Ramon Perera, who went into exile in London in 1939 where he met Winston Churchill to discuss the city’s defences before the Blitz.
“It’s interesting that Churchill opted for either private Anderson shelters or ones constructed by the state,” Sánchez says. “Parliamentary records show that the British government rejected what they called the Barcelona model of community-built shelters because they associated it with communism and the republic.”
Setting the exhibition in La Modelo, a century-old prison that closed in 2017, adds to the sensation of danger and oppression.
Sánchez says: “I’m really glad the exhibition is here in a prison and not in a museum. This is where people who resisted the regime ended up, so now we’ve brought the resistance back.”
The photographs, mounted in individual cells in two wings of the jail, are divided into three sections: communal shelters, industrial and private.
In one shelter, grateful citizens conserved the paw mark of a dog called Trotsky, much loved because it could hear the planes coming and started barking before the air-raid sirens, thus serving as an early-warning system.
The aerial bombardment of Barcelona began quite late in the war but was particularly intense. In a little less than two years, close to 2,000 bombs were dropped on the city in 385 attacks, killing 2,700 and wounding 7,000, numbers that would have been far higher had the shelters not existed.
1,322 Refugios Antiaéreos de Barcelona is at La Modelo, Espai Memorial until 31 July
