Archaeology,Nostalgia,and Tourism in Post–Civil War Barcelona (1939-1959)

Abstract

Barcelona’s transformation into a global destination after Spain’s transition to democracy has received significant attention from international scholarship, but this is less the case for developments under Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) that paved the way for the city’s perceived attractiveness today. A critical examination of two of these developments in the 1940s and 1950s—the disencumbering of the area in front of the cathedral and the disclosure of sections of the Roman city wall—and the discourses around them reveals the interplay of long-standing planning and archaeological concerns, nostalgic and ambiguously dissenting reactions among observers at the time, and the gradual emergence of Barcelona as a tourist city. Such interplay subtly mirrors the often unacknowledged eclecticism of the dictatorship’s urban discourse and practice.