Urban renovation work on a quiet street in Barcelona’s Hostafrancs neighbourhood has uncovered a tangible link to the city’s turbulent past: a Spanish Civil War anti-aircraft shelter that has lain dormant for over 80 years.
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The discovery was made on Carrer del Vint-i-sis de Gener de 1641, where workers peeling back the asphalt confirmed what local memory and historical documents had long suggested. Beneath the pavement lay the remains of shelter number 657, a silent testament to the civilian response to aerial bombardments during the conflict.
The find generated excitement, yet it did not completely surprise. Residents knew of the shelter’s existence, officially recorded in the 1938 Atles dels refugis de la Guerra Civil (Atlas of Civil War Shelters). This historical document placed one of its entrances at number 13 on the street, very close to its current re-exposure point.
Excavating a Community’s Past
With the shelter’s location confirmed, teams from the Servei d’Arqueologia de Barcelona (Barcelona Archaeology Service) have begun a careful excavation. Their work aims to map out the shelter’s full story, determining its exact dimensions, access points, and whether it possessed features like a ventilation tunnel, details they never fully documented.
The city’s ongoing development frequently brings its rich history to the surface. Recent years have seen similar remarkable finds across Barcelona, from a vast Roman forum discovered under a Gothic Quarter hotel to medieval ovens unearthed in El Raval.
According to local historian Agus Giralt, a member of the heritage group Patrimonis Invisibles, the remains are unquestionably linked to the documented shelter. “Knowing how these shelters are, there was certainly more than one access point to guarantee safety in case of a collapse,” he told local broadcaster betevé.
Giralt explained that many of the shelters in Hostafrancs and the neighbouring districts of Sants and La Bordeta were remarkable feats of community engineering. “They were built for the neighbourhood by organised workers in response to the bombings,” he said. “What this explains is the nature of the associative fabric in these neighbourhoods in those years.”
A Legacy of Underground Resistance
These civilian-built shelters often featured construction techniques common in mining, such as sturdy Catalan vaults, creating a network of simple but effective subterranean galleries. While these districts were not the most heavily bombed areas of Barcelona, they paradoxically have one of the highest concentrations of shelters, with around 140 registered.
The discovery of shelter 657 adds to a growing list of rediscovered sites in the area, including those found under Plaça de Bonet i Muixí and on Carrer de Toledo. This has fuelled a growing call from historians and citizens to preserve and open up this subterranean heritage.
“One of our demands is that we believe some of the shelters in Sants, Hostafrancs, and La Bordeta should be made visitable,” Giralt stated. He advocates for a detailed study to determine the most suitable candidate for public access, acknowledging that “obviously there are many and it can’t be done with all of them.”
The city has already seen success with managed historical sites, such as the archaeological tours offered during the renovation of Las Ramblas, which provide the public with a direct connection to Barcelona’s layered past.
The renovation work on Carrer del Vint-i-sis de Gener de 1641, intended to widen pavements and repave the deteriorating road, had anticipated the find. From the outset, the project’s plans included an archaeology team to manage such a discovery, mitigating potential delays that have plagued other public works projects in the city. Now, engineers and archaeologists will document the shelter before adapting the final stages of the street’s redesign, part of a wider effort to improve pedestrian access in the Sants-Montjuïc district.
