In a normal country, Lluís Bassaganya would have a monument and the congratulations of the administration. Here he has a criminal record and a sentence of one year and ten months in prison, which fortunately did not imply his admission to prison. Lluís, who does not appear to be 47 years old, is an insurance agent and runs an agency in Camprodon, in the Girona region of Ripollès. He began to wreak havoc on him at age 13.
His mother already told him: “This will cause you problems, fill meu”. He and his great friend Sergi Mesas, who would later go to live in the neighboring town of Olot, were not great students, but they loved the mountains. And who doesn't in Camprodon? When the classes at the Doctor Robert school ended, the two of them would go to the woods in search of fossils. One day they found no stone remains from the past. They found bullets.
It was when the works for the golf course began. Until then, the Civil War was something distant for Lluís and Sergi, a history of books, a taboo subject that many older people in the municipality did not even want to talk about at the end of the eighties. Those bullets were a slap of reality. The two friends discovered that Camprodon and its mountains experienced the dramatic flight from the Spanish Republicans.
Between January 27 and February 14, 1939, 100,000 people fled through Coll d'Ares and other nearby ports. In that human flood were Mariano Gracia and his children Antonio, Alicia and Amadeo, protagonists of an iconic photo. Incredible as it may seem, these ravines and goat paths could be mistaken well into democracy for a landfill. But they were a museum with rusty vestiges of endless dramas...
In 1989, when Lluís was 13 years old and began fishing or digging up bullets in the river or next to the golf course, the Pyrenees still treasured the remains of a retreat and a defeat. Weapons, bombs and car parts that rotted in the sun without anyone doing anything against the corrosion of oblivion. Nobody? No. The day of the bullets, Lluís decided to do his bit and ignore his mother. "This will bring you trouble, fill meu."
He and Sergi spoke with the director of the school, Pere Ignasi Isern, who recommended that they visit another resident of the town: Alejandro Cuadrado, who over the years would become a great friend of Lluís (and a partner in legal troubles). Until then, that man was only the owner of a Renault workshop for the two schoolchildren. "If you want to find something other than bullets, go up to Coll d' Ares", he told them.
Two children with children's bikes without gears and a feat worthy of the Tour: one Saturday they climbed the port, 18 kilometers of uninterrupted climbing with 500 meters of unevenness. They still don't believe it. The climb? No, what awaited them up there: remains of pistols, rifles, machine guns, vehicles,... Lluís dedicated himself that same day to trying to save what he could to prevent forgetfulness from swallowing everything.
More than 34 years later, not even he knows how many pieces he has rescued. "More than 5,000, if we count the bullets." He never hid and made free exhibitions of his findings with the help of that mechanic, Mr. Cuadrado. But, alas!, ignorance of the law does not exempt from compliance. And they should have known that storing that could be considered a deposit of weapons of war, among other crimes.
In 2015, when his wife was pregnant with their second child (they were already the parents of a three-year-old boy), Lluís Bassaganya and Alejandro Cuadrado appeared on all the news, arrested by the Civil Guard in the framework of an operation against trafficking of weapons. They were presented almost as if they were emulators of the Saudi Adnan Khashoggi and found themselves under a sword of Damocles that could lead to up to 18 years in prison.
If they had let it devastate all time (or the Spanish and French collectors who later discovered the Coll d'Ares) nothing would have happened to them, but they wanted to honor the exiles, as their great friend did on the other side of the border Christophe Bartre, from Prats de Mollo. The objects tell their story. Some weapons were unusual, due to their manufacture or their owners, although they were not the jewel in the crown...
The most moving finds are others that are apparently less relevant: a car door, the skeleton of a bunk bed, suitcase handles, canned food, bottles, plates, keys, spoons and forks, cans of condensed milk... Any of these items. , explains Lluís, “reveals the dimension of the drama. Think, for example, of the rusty supports of a stretcher. Every time we saw them, our hair stood on end."
Until there, they said, the occupant of the stretcher would have arrived alive. “If they got rid of the stretcher, it was already unnecessary. Nearby would be the remains of a soldier or a civilian who fled dying and did not reach the border. The same uneasiness overwhelmed them when they found makeup boxes "that some women tried to keep before being forced to give up everything."
That is also represented by the handles and the handles of the suitcases: the total renunciation. “You flee from Barcelona. All your possessions fit in a cardboard suitcase and, when you are one step away from the border, you cannot take it anymore and you throw it into the ravine, which swallows everything except those pieces of metal”. The cans of condensed milk were from mothers who could not breastfeed their children. Cold, misery, fear, hunger, tiredness. Defeat.
That counts the trousseau of the Republicans. The roads to France were littered with spoons, forks, plates, and canteens. They believed that they would no longer need them and they threw them away. They were wrong. These utensils would have been a treasure in the depleted French camps of Argelès, Barecarès and Saint Cyprien, where a simple pot was used to cook water and store the meager food rations they received.
They were arrested in 2015 and tried in 2018. The institutions left him and Alejandro Cuadrado alone. The City Council recognized the "good faith" of him and the Generalitat, the historical value of the pieces they recovered, but without getting wet about their innocence. In the end, the accusations were watered down and the prosecutor settled for lesser sentences that did not involve imprisonment (one year and ten months for each).
The Civil Guard destroyed weapons and disabled and returned others, which are now municipal property. Lluís, who continues to guide and disseminate history, is the alma mater of a permanent exhibition on the retreat that has put Camprodon on the world map of museums. At the end of the year they will prescribe their records. "I've had a bad time, yes. And what is that compared to those who lost even their suitcases and spoons?
