You enter the underground car park of the Plaza de la Revolució de setembre de 1868 in the Vila de Gràcia neighborhood and go down some stairs to the minus four floor. Then, after losing cell phone coverage, leaving the parking spaces aside, you enter a narrow tunnel with some benches where people sat to wait for everything to end as soon as possible, for the fascist planes to move away at once. for all...
We are talking mainly about women and children. People, in those moments, always remained silent, holding their breath, afraid that everything would collapse on their heads... And from there you go to what was an infirmary, a precarious treatment room that still has a sink, a masonry shelf, the electrical panel, the hooks that kept the operating table stable despite the vibrations unleashed by the bombs... And then you go to a small medicine store.
The City Council will open to the public during all the days of the Gràcia festival the recently restored and musealized remains of the anti-aircraft shelter opened during the Civil War in the Plaza de la Revolució. The municipal investment was close to 31,000 euros. The Taller d'Història de Gràcia will manage these guided tours. These excursions will last half an hour each and will cost three euros. Then, the City Council will see how it gives continuity to the initiative.
The representative of the Taller d'Història de Gràcia, Josep Maria Contel, and the curator restorer of the Barcelona archeology service, Montserrat Pugès, also detailed that the place remained forgotten until the mid-1990s. issue was brought to light again. The municipal objective is that his memory is not diluted again. Unfortunately, the preserved corner is only a small part of what it was, barely 5% of the entire refuge.
Some, especially lately, believe that these initiatives reopen wounds. Others, however, could not wait for the first guided tour and stood up for the presentation to the press, in the case of the writer Ascen Capel Cilla. "It's that my mother, Teresina Cilla, used to come to this same shelter, during the war, when she was barely 11 years old, when she was a girl and lived next door, on Torrent de l'Olla street," said the writer, very happy, after being let in.
“People would arrive scared to death, with their cards in hand, because to enter these shelters you had to have a card, and scared to death they would sit, listening to the silence and the explosions, the silence between the explosions... because the longer the silences, the further the planes flew... But my mother never told me. She explained it to me her neighbor. Many people who lived through the war never wanted to talk about it again. We cannot allow this to fall into oblivion."
