One Saturday we picked up some food from the Boqueria and headed to Parc del Guinardó in the North of Barcelona, up high on the hills. Needless to say it's a lovely park with lovely views of the city, a nice change in perspective from the views from Montjuic and Tibidabo.
We kept on walking uphill until we couldn't get higher and came across this odd place on the hill above the park...
Strange circular concrete foundations and thick walls covered in graffiti,
seemed to be the favourite hang-out location for the local teenage goths,
and people with lots of spare shoes and nothing to do...
The place fascinated me, its so much fun to encounter places like these in today's cities for so many reasons, I think the main one being the excitement of finding an abandoned spot, an unknown place (which the tourists don't know about!) and being so high up with incredible views, almost alone.
It reminded me of antiaircraft posts used by the British in Malta during the 2nd WW, long since abandoned and covered in graffiti, but I thought the position odd because it seemed like the guns would be aiming over the city - the ones I know in Malta face out to sea. We assumed that it was an old site for radio transmitters or something like that.
I've now discovered that they were antiaircraft batteries used during the Spanish Civil War in the thirties. It's incredible that nobody knew what we were talking about when we described it, especially considering the Catalans have been so deeply scarred by the Civil War. Apparently there is a plan to rehabilitate them and construct a museum that would relate the history of the area and the Civil War, although I'm not sure how reliable that information was because it said it was planned for 2006 and we visited in 2009...
Perhaps the attack on Barcelona was more likely to come from the mainland as opposed to the sea, (only conjecture) in that case the idea being to get the planes before they got over the hills and over the city....who knows I have no idea how Franco launched his attacks over the city....and as we both know the Italians were equally responsible for alot of the aerial attacks over the city, (plaça sant felip neri) - so perhaps planes did come from the sea... it would be interesting to find out. j
ReplyDeleteyes completely agree - i suppose Malta, being a tiny island, obviously only has antiaircraft guns pointing out to sea... makes sense that the rules dont apply in a large country during a civil war..
ReplyDeleteI like the pictures. :-)
ReplyDeleteMost of the early aerial attacks Barcelona's AA defenses were designed for were by Italian planes coming from Mallorca, for which this battery in the Guinardo would have been ideal. As the front collapsed in late 1938 and early 1939 the city became vulnerable also to land-based German aviation of the Condor Brigade.
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