The quarry behind the hill, and the twenty-five columns of names

Montjuïc was quarried for centuries. The stone came out of it and went into the city, and the holes it left behind kept being used for other things: a theatre was built against one of them in 1929, and gardens went into others.

One of them was used for the dead.

What it is

The Fossar de la Pedrera is a worked-out quarry inside Montjuïc cemetery. Its origin, as the city describes it, is the pedrera Moragas, where the destitute and the unidentified were buried — the pit for people whose families could not pay for anything else.

It went on functioning as a common grave until 1979.

What is in it, in the municipal cemetery service’s own account: the remains of people buried without resources; of victims of the bombing of Barcelona by Italian, German and Francoist aircraft between 1936 and 1939; and of the more than 1,700 people executed in Barcelona by the Franco regime between 1939 and 1952.

That page is worth quoting exactly, because it does not round: 1.706 homes i 11 dones. One thousand seven hundred and six men and eleven women — 1,717 people.

And the city does not agree with itself about that number. Barcelona’s own memory programme, on the page for the memorial wall at the Camp de la Bota — the shore where most of these people were shot — gives the total as 1,706, from research by the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya on the records of the summary courts martial, and that is how many names are carved on the wall. Same city, same years, eleven people apart. The eleven are the women. We could find nothing published that reconciles the two counts, so we are giving you both and neither is ours.

What the city does not publish anywhere is a total for the grave itself. You will often see a figure of around four thousand attached to this place; that number is the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana’s, not the city’s, and the executed are only one of the three groups the cemetery service lists. We are giving you the facts separately rather than the rounder one that merges them.

The columns

The memorial was built after a long campaign by an association formed for that purpose, and was inaugurated by the city and the Generalitat on 27 October 1985. The Ajuntament credits the project to the architect Beth Galí; the encyclopedia credits Galí together with Màrius Quintana and Pere Casajoana.

It is a landscape rather than a monument. Twenty-five stone columns carry names — mostly, the city says, the names of those executed at the Camp de la Bota, down on the shore on the other side of Barcelona. There is a Holocaust memorial of ten stone blocks. There is a sculpture, Ferran Ventura’s Pietat. In 2011 a further piece by Juanjo Novella was added for executed libertarians.

Companys

He was shot in the moat of the castle at six in the morning on 15 October 1940, at the top of the same hill.

From then until 1985 he lay in a niche in this cemetery with no inscription identifying it. On the day the memorial was inaugurated, his remains were moved to the mausoleum that stands at the centre of it.

Forty-five years unmarked, on a hill in his own city. That is the fact worth carrying away, and it does not need any help from us. The rest of what happened to him is in the history of the castle.

The place the names come from

Most of the names on the columns belong to people who were shot at the Camp de la Bota, a stretch of shore at the north-eastern edge of Barcelona. The first executions at its parapet were on 10 February 1939 and the last on 14 March 1952.

The parapet itself is gone. The site was built over for the Fòrum development, and since 2004 it has lain under the water of the marina. The city’s history museum commissioned a sonar survey and a dive to look for it, and found no remaining trace.

So the columns up here are, in a real sense, the only place that site still exists.

Going

It is inside Montjuïc cemetery — which is a considerable place in its own right — on the seaward flank of the hill, and it is open to the public. The municipal cemetery service also runs free guided visits and school activities; their own pages carry the current arrangements, which is where we would rather send you than print something that goes out of date.

It is roughly fifteen minutes on foot from the castle side of the hill, and it is almost always empty. Barcelona’s tourism observatory records that 55.3 % of visitors reach Montjuïc. Essentially none of them reach this.

Two requests, and they are the only two.

Do not treat it as a viewpoint. It has one, and that is not what it is.

Go quietly and do not photograph the graves. People come here to visit relatives. That is still true on a Tuesday afternoon in August.

Why our walk ends here

Our Montjuïc walking tour finishes here, after the 1929 fairground and the castle. Not for a twist ending. Because a hill that gets visited for its fountain and its view has a quarry on the back of it, and an afternoon that takes the first two and leaves out the third has not been to Montjuïc. It has been to the brochure.

It is told plainly, by an actor, without dramatising it — the material does not need it. Whether that is the right way to spend an afternoon is is Montjuïc worth it, and the smaller question of how you get up the hill is here.

If you want the same subject at the other end of the city and on a smaller scale, the marks on the church wall in Plaça de Sant Felip Neri come from an air raid on 30 January 1938, and some of the people killed in raids like it are buried in this quarry.

The quarries that produced this one, and what else was done with the holes, are here — and why the hill is made of the rock it is is the layer underneath all of it.