(Photograph by Antoni Campañà from https://blog.museunacional.cat/en/the-hotel-colon-the-story-behind-a-snapshot-by-antoni-campana/)
Up until 1880, the most prestigious part of Barcelona was La Rambla. However, towards the end of the decade Placa de Catalunya became more fashionable. By 1888, a beautiful glass building in Great Exhibition style had been erected on the corner of Placa de Catalunya and Passeig de Gracia. The building housed Gran Café Siglo XIX, a luxurious social space with room for up to seven hundred people.
On account of its growing popularity, Gran Café was enlarged in 1897 with the addition of a large billiards hall. In 1902, the establishment was once again upgraded, this time to the status of a hotel. Designed in delicate modernist Art Deco style, Hotel Colón, as the hotel was named, was immediately recognised as one of the leading hotels of the world.
The great and the good came here. Salvador Dali, Federico Garcia Lorca, and other intellectuals drank coffee on the premises. The future King Christian of Denmark as well as the heir to the Japanese throne, King Kuni Kuniyoshi, stayed here. There were visits by Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, and countless other celebrities.
In 1924, Hotel Colón became the home of Spain’s inaugural radio station (Radio Barcelona). The very first radio broadcast in Spain was made from within the confines of the hotel. Today a modest mosaic which commemorates the 35th Anniversary of the broadcast can be observed on the corner of Carrer de Bordeus and Carrer de Loreto in the Les Corts neighbourhood.[1]
(The modest wall mosaic in Les Corts commemorating the 35th anniversary of Spain's first radio broadcast from Hotel Colon).
Despite its auspicious beginnings, Hotel Colón's fortunes would soon change for the worse as was also the case for Barcelona and, indeed, for Spain itself.
On 18 July 1936, a score of young men checked into several rooms in Hotel Colón. The following morning they re-emerged armed to the teeth with machine guns and hand grenades. They took over the hotel. They were affiliated with the military. Their attack marked the start - in Barcelona - of Francisco Franco’s fascist coup against the Second Spanish Republic.
The coup attempt initially failed in Barcelona. The rebels in Hotel Colón and other locations in the city were defeated after a day of bloody fighting. The defeat of the coup mongers owed much to the actions of officers from Mossos D’Esquadra, the Catalan Police, who refused to join the coup. Barcelona’s Guardia Civil and the air base at El Prat also sided with the Republic. However, the main reason the coup initially failed in Barcelona was heroism on the part of members of the anarchist union Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) as well as its affiliate organisation, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI).
Led by Buenaventura Durruti, a militant leader within CNT-FAI, anarchists armed only with primitive grenades and homemade armoured cars defeated vastly superior forces in the main fascist strongholds at the Drassanes and Andreu barracks.
Durruti's victories enabled the anarchists to seize some 30,000 rifles. With a single stroke, Durruti had transformed the CNT-FAI from a union of unarmed workers into an army with six times as much firepower as the combined force of Mossos D'Esquadra and Guardia Civil; Durruti was suddenly the strongest political force in Catalunya.
Unsurprisingly, Durruti was invited to talks with Republican forces on the night of 20 July 1936 to form a new government for Catalonia. The talks resulted in the establishment of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia, or CCMA, which immediately became the de facto government of Barcelona. Due to the prominent role of the anarchists within the CCMA, this moment is now widely recognised as the start of the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
Over the following two to three years, some 3 million people in Barcelona and other parts of Spain practiced self-government in one of the only ever examples of a society organising itself along purely libertarian socialist lines.
Meanwhile, Durruti's leadership skills were in great demand. In November 1936, he went to Madrid to aid in the defence of the city. On 20 November, aged 40, he died from a bullet lodged in his heart. His body was transported to Barcelona, where a quarter of a million people accompanied his coffin to its final resting place in the Montjuic Cemetery. The inscription on Durruti's grave reads:
"Nosostros llevamos un mundo nuevo en nuestros corazones"
(We carry a new world in our hearts)
(The graves of Ferrer, Durruti, and Ascaso at Montjuic Cemetary in Barcelona)
To the right of Durruti's grave lies his comrade Francisco Ascaso, who was among 500 people killed in the assault on the Atarazanas barracks on 20 July 1936. Left of Durruti lies Francisco Ferrer Guardia, an educationalist who founded the Modern Schools movement in first decade of the century. Ferrer was executed by firing squad on 13 October 1909 based on a guilty verdict on trumped-up charges of insurrection following Tragic Week, a series of violent clashes between the army and anarchists in Barcelona in late July 1909.
To this day, the graves of Durruti, Ascaso, and Ferrer symbolise - and remind us of - the many who gave their lives for the ideals of freedom and social justice.
Durruti's death was a major blow to anarchism in Spain. And worse was to come. While the anarchist experiment continued in various parts of southern and rural Spain until the end of the Civil War, major cracks were appearing within the broad ranks of anti-fascists in Barcelona as early as 1937. The most important line of division centred around the question whether the efforts of the anti-fascist alliance should focus on strengthening the anarchist revolution or instead postpone the revolution in order first to defeat fascism.
In May 1937, during the so-called Barcelona May Days the tensions between the different factions erupted into outright violence pitting moderate republicans (in unholy alliance with Soviet-armed Stalinist communists) against anarchists and anti-Stalinists communists.
Lacking Durruti's leadership, Barcelona May Days proved fatal for the city's anarchists and eventually for the Spanish Revolution itself. In the months that followed, Barcelona's anarchists were rounded up in their thousands by pro-Stalinist communists and imprisoned, tortured, and executed, many within the walls of the Hotel Colón, which, by then, had been commandeered by pro-Soviet Communists. Large portraits of Lenin and Stalin hung on the façade as can be seen in the famous photograph by Antoni Campañà at the top of this blog post.
As is well known, the Stalinists were themselves ousted from Barcelona by Franco's forces within a couple of years of May Days. The fascists tore down the portraits of Lenin and Stalin and replaced them with pro-Franco and pro-Mussolini slogans (picture below). The brief moments when Hotel Colón, Durruti, and the Spanish Revolution shone on the world stage were forever over.
(Fascist slogans on Hotel Colon's façade. Source: https://blog.museunacional.cat/en/the-hotel-colon-the-story-behind-a-snapshot-by-antoni-campana/)
But life goes on.
(The building that was once the Hotel Colón)
Today, the building that was once the Hotel Colón has been re-designed in somewhat nondescript classic style (picture above). An Apple store occupies the ground floor. This is telling, because many of the photographs in this blog have been taken using an iPhone and the text is written on a MacBook.
Is there any clearer illustration of how economics prevails over politics in the long run? In fact, politics so often slows, impedes, or outright reverses human progress in the short run.
Dismal political failures led up to and followed the Spanish Civil War. These failures reverberate all the way to our time. History is best enjoyed long after rather than during the events, as the long-suffering inhabitants of Barcelona in the 20th Century can testify.
The End
[1] For more detailed history of the Hotel Colón see https://blog.museunacional.cat/en/the-hotel-Colón-the-story-behind-a-snapshot-by-antoni-campana/