Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
be in Spanish. Independent political activity was banned as was the celebration of traditional
Catalan holidays.
In Barcelona, the Francoist Josep Maria de Porcioles became mayor in 1957, a post he
held until 1973. That same year, he obtained for the city a 'municipal charter' that expanded
the mayor's authority and the city's capacity to raise and spend taxes, manage urban devel-
opment and, ultimately, widen the city's metropolitan limits to absorb neighbouring territ-
ory. He was responsible for such monstrosities as the concrete municipal buildings on Plaça
de Sant Miquel in the Barri Gòtic. His rule marked a grey time for Barcelona.
By the 1950s opposition to Franco had turned to peaceful mass protests and strikes. In
1960 an audience at the city's Palau de la Música Catalana concert hall sang a banned
Catalan anthem in front of Franco. The ringleaders included a young Catholic banker, Jordi
Pujol, who would later rise to pre-eminence in the post-Franco era. For his singing effort he
wound up in jail for a short time.
Under Franco a flood of 1.5 million immigrants from poorer parts of Spain, chiefly An-
dalucía, Extremadura and the northwest, poured into Catalonia (750,000 of them to Bar-
celona) in the 1950s and '60s looking for work. Many lived in appalling conditions. While
some made the effort to learn Catalan and integrate as fully as possible into local society, the
majority came to form Spanish-speaking pockets in the poorer working-class districts of the
city and in a ring of satellite towns. Even today, the atmosphere in many of these towns is
more Andalucian than Catalan. Catalan nationalists will tell you it was all part of a Francoist
plot to undermine the Catalan identity.
The Road to Recovery
When the death of Franco was announced in 1975,
barcelonins
took to the streets in celeb-
ration. The next five years saw the gradual return of democracy. In 1977 Josep Tarradellas,
who was head of Catalonia's government in exile returned to Barcelona after Franco's death,
and was officially recognised by the Spanish government as head of a new Catalan coali-
tion.
Barcelonins
who lived during that time will likely recall the historic words given from
the balcony of the Palau de la Generalitat. Before a huge crowd gathered on Plaça de Sant
Jaume, he said, '
Ciutadans de Catalunya, ja sóc aquí!
' (Citizens of Catalonia, I am here!).
Twenty years after his stint in Franco's jails, Pujol (an early ringleader in protests against
the Francoists) was elected president of Catalonia in 1980. These were the first free regional
elections since before the civil war. A wily antagonist of the central authorities in Madrid,
Pujol waged a quarter-century war of attrition, eking out greater fiscal and policy autonomy
and vigorously promoting a re-Catalanisation program, with uneven success.
