Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Ever at the vanguard, Barcelona had the first daily newspaper printed in Spain, its first
cinema, public phone and airline (to Majorca). It also built the world's second metropolit-
an railroad (London was first).
The Civil War
On 17 July 1936, an army uprising in Morocco kick-started the Spanish Civil War. The main
players in the conflict were the Nationalists, who were allied with conservatives (and the
church). Angry at the new leftist direction Spain was heading, they staged a coup, led by
General Franco and other rebels, and quickly gained the following of most of the army. On
the opposite side was the Republican government, which was supported by those loyal to
Spain's democratically elected government. Republican supporters were a loose coalition of
workers' parties, socialists, anarchists, communists and other left-wing groups.
Barcelona's army garrison attempted to take the city for General Franco but was defeated
by anarchists and police loyal to the government. Franco's Nationalist forces quickly took
hold of most of southern and western Spain; Galicia and Navarra in the north were also his.
Most of the east and industrialised north stood with Madrid. Initial rapid advances on Mad-
rid were stifled and the two sides settled in for almost three years of misery.
For nearly a year, Barcelona was run by anarchists and the Trotskyist militia of the
Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM; the Marxist Unification Workers' Party),
with Companys president only in name. Factory owners and rightists fled the city. Unions
took over factories and public services, hotels and mansions became hospitals and schools,
everyone wore workers' clothes (in something of a foretaste of what would later happen in
Mao's China), bars and cafes were collectivised, trams and taxis were painted red and black
(the colours of the anarchists), and one-way streets were ignored as they were seen to be
part of the old system.
The anarchists were a disparate lot ranging from gentle idealists to hardliners who drew
up death lists, held kangaroo courts, shot priests, monks and nuns (over 1200 of whom were
killed in Barcelona province during the civil war), and also burnt and wrecked churches -
which is why so many of Barcelona's churches are today oddly plain inside. They in turn
were shunted aside by the communists (directed by Stalin from Moscow) after a bloody in-
ternecine battle in Barcelona that left 1500 dead in May 1937. Barcelona also suffered aerial
bombing raids carried out by Italian bombers sympathetic to Franco. The pockmarked walls
around Plaça Sant Felip Neri still bear the scars of one particularly gruesome day of bom-
bardment when dozens of civilians - many of them children - were killed here.
