The website ‘The City of Shelters’ uses images, documents and official information from the time to map out the 1,322 air-raid shelters beneath the streets of Barcelona. The site is the result of fifteen years of work on documentation, research and investigation by the Barcelona Archaeology Service.

The map of the city produced by Vicenç Martorell in 1935 is the reference document from which users can see all the information gathered over these years of research, with interactive points of interest indicating the location of each shelter. In addition, the red heat spots indicate the impact of all the bombs dropped in the city during the war.

A dissemination project with a very human dimension

The initiative by the Councillor’s Office for Democratic Memory seeks to reach all audiences, from those who are very familiar with the history of the city’s air-raid shelters to those discovering them for the first time.

The website makes a thorough exploration of the most informative content, without overlooking the human side of the emotions and feelings of city people who lived through that time. It explains the construction process, as well as life in the shelters, the experiences, noise and smells people encountered as they sought refuge from the bombs of the Francoist and Italian air forces.

The history of the shelters in three main blocks

The website also features a section offering a more in-depth knowledge of the history of the air-raid shelters built in Barcelona from the end of 1936, with three main sections:

• Barcelona beneath the bombs. Details the bloody Civil war after Franco’s coup, the air raids, the ruins in the streets, the social and political organisation to defend the city, the building of the shelters and the solidarity of citizens.
• Life in the shelters. Collective organisation among local people made it possible to build shelters everywhere, some of which were not always able to save lives. This is explained in this section.
• The days after. What became of the shelters after the war? Franco’s fear of being attacked by the Allies after Hitler’s defeat led to efforts to recover many of them.

1,322 shelters around the whole city

The current databases from the Barcelona Archaeology Service put the number of documented shelters at 1,322. Most of them were built during the Civil War. More precisely, 10 were built in 1936; 111 in 1937; 1,117 in 1938 and one in 1939. A further 22 were built after the war ended in victory for Franco.

The distribution of air-raid shelters in Barcelona is uneven between districts. The highest number of shelters have been located in L’Eixample (301), followed by Ciutat Vella (204), Sants-Montjuïc (195), Sant Martí (172) and Sant Andreu (137). The rest are distributed between the other districts, with the lowest number in Les Corts (27).