Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lowing a military call-up for Spanish campaigns in Morocco, rampaging mobs wrecked 70
religious buildings and workers were shot on the street in reprisal.
In the post-WWI slump, unionism took hold. This movement was led by the anarchist
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT; National Workers' Confederation), which em-
braced 80% of the city's workers. During a wave of strikes in 1919 and 1920, employers
hired assassins to eliminate union leaders. The 1920s dictator General Miguel Primo de
Rivera opposed bourgeois-Catalan nationalism and working-class radicalism, banning the
CNT and even closing Barcelona football club, a potent symbol of Catalanism. But he did
support the staging of a second world fair in Barcelona, the Montjuïc World Exhibition of
1929.
Rivera's repression only succeeded in uniting, after his fall in 1930, Catalonia's radical
elements. Within days of the formation of Spain's Second Republic in 1931, leftist Catalan
nationalists of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), led by Francesc Macià and
Lluís Companys, proclaimed Catalonia a republic within an imaginary 'Iberian Federation'.
Madrid pressured them into accepting unitary Spanish statehood, but after the leftist Popular
Front victory in the February 1936 national elections, Catalonia briefly won genuine
autonomy. Companys, its president, carried out land reforms and planned an alternative Bar-
celona Olympics to the official 1936 games in Nazi Berlin.
But things were racing out of control. The left and the right across Spain were shaping up
for a showdown.
A CATALAN SUBMARINE
It could have been the Spanish Navy's V2, a late-19th-century secret weapon. Narcis
Monturiol i Estarriol (1819-85), part-time publisher and all-round utopian, was fascin-
ated by the sea. In 1859 he launched a wooden, fish-shaped submarine, theIctíneo,in
Barcelona. Air shortages made only brief dives possible but Monturiol became an
overnight celebrity. He received, however, not a jot of funding.
Undeterred, he sank himself further into debt by designingIctíneo II. This was a
first. It was 17m long, its screws were steam driven and Monturiol had devised a sys-
tem for renewing the oxygen inside the vessel. It was trialled in 1864 but again attrac-
ted no finance. Four years later, the vessel was broken up for scrap.
If the Spaniards had had a few of these when they faced the US Navy off Cuba and
in the Philippines in 1898, perhaps things might have turned out differently!
