When you ask a neighbor in La Jonquera where the border neighborhood of Els Límits is, a commercial center where practically only French people come to buy, attracted by the most competitive prices for alcohol and tobacco, they look at you with a certain surprise.
Although a sign, before passing the old police checkpoints, indicates that we are in Els Límits, that place name squeaks in the ears of the natives. Popularly, they have always called him El Portús. Pussy.
Not to be confused with the French quarter of Le Perthus, with which it borders, and its Catalan translation, El Pertús. The entrance signs to most of the Roussillon municipalities are identified with both languages.
While Els Límits / Los Límites is practically unknown on a popular scale, that place name has been used officially in all kinds of documents since 1883. It was that year when the customs office was moved to that border neighborhood.
"Since then it was used exclusively at an official level, by customs officials, the National Police and the Civil Guard, especially after the Civil War," explains the former mayor Jordi Cabezas, in the report that the La Jonquera City Council has presented to the Institut d'Estudis Catalans to make the name change official.
The agency has two months to respond and validate the linguistic correctness of the new name. The current mayoress, Sònia Martínez, points out that once the Consistory receives this report, the change will be approved in plenary. “The name change is a municipal competence,” she explains.
Twenty years ago, when Cabezas was mayor, the City Council already took the first steps in its attempt to change the name of this neighborhood on the border with France. In the plenary held on November 28, 2002, the Consistory asked the General Directorate of Local Administration to modify the maps of the official gazetteer of major toponymy of Catalunya and other documents of the Servei Cartogràfic.
Martínez explains that the change was made halfway. It was rectified in the maps, but not in the official documentation, despite the fact that according to the report signed by Jordi Cabezas "since 2002 the name of Los Límites has been disappearing from the commercial advertising of the establishments, the official documents issued by the City Council and other official bodies and institutions”.
This small neighbourhood, which has barely fifty residents, lives mainly from commerce. The coming and going of French citizens along the Spanish sidewalk is common. They take advantage of much cheaper prices for products such as tobacco – there are five tobacconists in this area alone – and alcohol.
But this was not always a commercial neighborhood. The beginning of this activity dates back to 1948, with the reopening of the border and the entry of the first tourists. The historian Albert Compte explained in the monograph on the municipality published in 1990 by the Quaderns Collection of the Revista de Girona that, starting in the 1950s, La Jonquera began to benefit from the opening up of the country.
"These are years in which the northern neighbors recover from the wounds of the war and begin a stage of prosperity, whose symbol was the car and mass tourism," he explains. "Due to its geographical position, those changes reached La Jonquera before other places."
The author, who died in 2014, explained that if in 1950 38,000 round-trip vehicles circulated through the municipality, in 1960 the figure had multiplied by 12, with more than 450,000. Today there are seven million people who transit between La Jonquera and the border neighborhood of Els Límits, or rather, El Portús.
