Hit and sunk.

Barcelona and the Camp de la Bota

Abstract

Camp de la Bota, an enclave located between the cities of Barcelona and Sant Adrià de Besòs, was a shantytown and the scene where Franco's dictatorship shot those condemned to death in the province between 1939 and 1952. With the recovery of democratic freedoms in Spain, only the associations formed by relatives of victims, political prisoners, former guerrilla fighters and other veteran combatants for the Republic, demanded some kind of marking before the unstoppable urban development (caused first by the Olympics and then by the construction of the Forum of Cultures) razed the place to the ground. In a space coveted by speculation and urban growth, the responses of the different administrations have been varied —from inaction to interventions motivated by the narrative of national reconciliation—, giving rise to a place of multi-layered memorial conflicts.