Barcelona

Running water, modern city

In 1891 the city council planned to build a pumping station in Trinitat to raise and channel water from the Montcada mine. The project was designed by the architect Pere Falqués i Urpí. The result was a set of modernist buildings (1915 – 1917), some with one storey and others with a basement. When Avinguda Merid-iana was created, the water treatment centre and the attached house stayed in Trinitat Nova, while the pumping centre and the Casa del Guarda were in Trinidad Vella. The Casa de l’Aigua is one of the heritage sites of the Barcelona City History Museum. When bombing first took place in Trinitat Vella, residents used the underground facilities of the Casa de l’Aigua, a pumping station that raised and channelled water from the Montcada mine, to pro¬tect themselves from air attacks. The neighbourhood was located between several military targets: the artillery barracks of Sant Andreu, the Casa de l’Aigua and the Puigcerdà rail line. One of the first bombings in the neighbourhood was carried out on 25 July 1937 by six or seven aircraft from a base in Mallorca. The Pont dels Tres Ulls (a bridge), today buried underground, was also used as a shelter during the first air raids, which was an access point to the underground gallery connecting the Casa de l’Aigua in Trinitat Vella to the water treatment centre in Trinitat Nova. Later, residents were mobilised to build shelters closer to their homes as the Casa de l’Aigua was quite secluded. Seventeen shelters were built in Trinitat Vella during the war.

A building at the neighbourhood’s service

The Museum of History of Barcelona, together with different institutions in the Sant Andreu and Nou Barris districts, is working on a process to adapt all the facilities and open them to the public. The goal is to make it possible for visitors to view the main facilities, such as the Trinitat Vella pumping station and water tank and the pipes that connect them and the rest of the city, in order to show how the supply of drinking water to large cities worked. Casa de l’Aigua has housed a vocational training centre since the early twenty-first century and also gave its name to a new underground station when the Metro reached the neighbourhood in 2003.