 Hello, welcome again to this session where we're gonna talk about shelters archaeology. I'm very happy they have invited me. My name is Silvia Marimón, journalist. I work at the Arran newspaper. I think it's fascinating to talk about what's hidden underground. I think it's something fascinating and it would be particularly interesting to talk about how we make these heritage visible. How to make this heritage part of citizens memory. 1,322 shelters. I think Anna has found out some more that can tell about resistance, solidarity and living under the bombs. Building all these shelters in a city that had no resources, with nearly a million refugees and in a city that did not know the ammunition used by the enemy. That's something extraordinary. And the city council has worked a lot on the topic and it has set up a website, Ciudad Refugee, where we have all the information about what has been discovered, found out until now. And at the end of the month an exhibition is gonna open up. And it's very interesting to know what these shelters tell us how they were built. They were built with shoes, with ammunition, with bottles, with drugs. Everything we have found. For instance, it was forbidden to talk about politics and religion in the shelters. And I think it will be interesting also to talk about what we do with the objects that have been found in shelters. Because sometimes objects found by archaeology contradicts the official narrative, gives us information through a sole of a shoe, a button. We can imagine our own narrative, the story that happened in the shelter. How we share all that with the citizens. How to make it available for a maximum of people. How we preserve it. What are the policies implemented in Spain, in Catalonia, in the UK. What new technologies can bring for us if the shelters are not accessible. How we make them accessible through new technologies. Could we give these shelters a second life? And what kind of youth have these shelters have after the work? We have Gabriel Moshenko, Professor of Public Archaeology at the University College of London. He's been working in the Archaeology of Comple, Flick, in the past 20 years. He has been digging in Cologne, Spain, Finland, Kenya and the UK. He has participated in the digging of anti-craft shelters and he has been publishing books. One in which he published the study he has done in shelters that were in schools. We have Jordi Ramos as well, archaeologist. He has a degree from the University of Barcelona. He has been studying Barcelona shelters, the ones built during the Civil War and during Franco's time. He knows very well the active and passive defense that was organized and he's an expert in mass graves. He is in Mallorca and not that long ago the special rapporteur of the United Nations visited Mallorca to see the work being done with mass graves and he is studying the PhD in Barcelona, directed by Coral Suley. We have Miquel Mithkida, an archaeologist and director of the Scientific Association Archeoantrio. He has participated in digging and identification of victims of the Spanish Civil War since 2008 and he has participated in the creation of a map of the shelters in Valencia, also in Madrid and Murcia and he has directed the digging of many mass graves, particularly in Valencia, in Paterna where 176 bodies have been recovered. He has studied also trenches, among others, in the city of Valencia. Xavier Maese, he has a degree in history by the University of Barcelona. He is an archaeologist as well. He has been working in numerous archaeological sites. He has worked for the Catalan government, the Andorran government and he is an archaeologist working for the Barcelona City Council and Monserrat Pujets, he has another degree, the of Barcelona. She has been a university professor and she has participated in the restoration of several materials from different times. She founded Grapat, a research group multidisciplinary that belongs to the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Rubira Ibregili. She has participated in several national and international fora. I would like to start with Gabriel Mushenka. I've seen his website and I like a sentence I found which says that as an archaeologist, a public archaeologist, his moral and ethical obligation is to convey the knowledge to a maximum of people and I wonder how they do that from London, how the information and the findings have been made accessible for a maximum of population and because you're a specialist in shelters, in British schools, would children tell us about their experience in those shelters? Is it on now? Yes. Wonderful. Okay. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here amongst colleagues who share my fascination with the heritage of civil defence and the history of bombing from the perspective of those who are bombed. My thanks to the organisers for inviting me here to take part. I must apologise for speaking only in English and the product of a typical British education. I've been working, studying, surveying and excavating air raid shelters for almost 20 years now. This has included field work as part of my doctorate in the archaeology and memory of the Second World War in London. I've explored concrete megastructures, medieval church crypts, used as shelters, prehistoric caves, used as shelters and a shallow trenches dug in forests. Every kind of shelter you can imagine. Often when I'm asked as an archaeologist to advise or consult on air raid shelter heritage, it is because they are about to be destroyed. This is a depressing but routine aspect of archaeological heritage management. In the course of my work I've identified several themes in the archaeology and heritage of air raid shelters. These include abundance. Shelters have been constructed in their tens of millions. What have I done here? No, this is not affecting us. No, that's fine. There are tens of millions of shelters constructed in the last century and more and more are being built all the time as well. Second theme is variety. Shelters vary, as I've said, enormously in scale material in their relation to pre-existing structures. Another theme is erasure. A few shelters have afterlives, as we've seen, as museums and monuments, but the vast majority are destroyed or allowed to decay. On the other hand, another theme is endurance. Despite this widespread lack of interest, many shelters have survived and some will likely continue to survive in good condition. The Berlin Bunker we saw this morning is probably indestructible. Finally, ambiguity. Between erasure and endurance, there is the ambiguous heritage of air raid shelters. Shelters built, buried and forgotten. Their entrances and their exits lost, at least for now. Some of these themes have already been touched on in this conference. I believe that they can help to structure and organize a future international collaborative study of air raid shelter heritage. I'll touch on them more in a moment. The main focus of my talk, and I will be quick because time is short, is to raise what I think are three significant challenges in the preservation and management of air raid shelter heritage. These are also challenges that face researchers trying to study this heritage as well. The first is a general lack of heritage protection, heritage guidance and academic and professional research. I am speaking mainly from a British perspective but from a general, with a global overview as well. The second theme draws on the those that I identified above. The perceived abundance and resilience of air raid shelter heritage. There are millions of them, according to this critique, and they are generally indestructible. Well, yes and no. Third and finally, the problem of invisibility. Literally, many shelters are hidden underground, while others are hidden in plain sight and yet others are misidentified. So, I will speak briefly to these three challenges. On the first point, the lack of protection, lack of research, lack of official interest. In his study of air raid shelter policies, the architectural historian Bosma asked, what standpoint should we adopt towards the eroding remains of military and civilian shelters? How can we establish their significance for the present? In the past 25 years, there's been a growth in archaeology and heritage management work focused on the violent conflicts of the 20th century. However, the heritage professional consensus around air raid shelters remains, we don't know, it doesn't really matter. It is described as a good subject for amateur historians and for archaeology students. This is heritage speak for, we don't care. This is reflected in research agenda documents in overviews of the discipline and in reports by professionals who really should know better. In 2016, Historic England, the National Heritage Preservation Organization, published a small pamphlet shown here called Civil Defence from the First World War to the Cold War. This small document attempts to cover a great deal of sites including all the major categories of UK civil defence structures. This is a good document, but it is very basic. It does not reflect a change in the heritage protection offered to air raid shelters, nor is there much guidance for excavation, survey recording or for historical research as well. On my second point, abundance, heritage value, like many forms of value, is in part a reflection of rarity and vulnerability. Air raid shelters are not at risk of extinction like tigers. Some of them built within living memory will probably last longer than the pyramids of Egypt. In Britain, the number of air raid shelters built during the Second World War in homes, gardens, parks, streets, schools and workplaces, number in the millions, probably between five and 10 million were constructed. Throughout the Cold War, many nations in Europe and elsewhere had laws that required the construction of shelters in all new homes. Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and elsewhere enjoy a rich abundance of air raid shelters. I would argue that there is a value in abundance as well as in rarity. The vast number of air raid shelters is reflected in their cultural impact in literature, art, on the heritage of everyday life and on vernacular architecture. They are living heritage. Finally, the problem of invisibility. In a school in North London, I conducted a geophysical survey that found eight air raid shelters underneath the football field, each for 50 people. Nobody in the school had any idea of their existence. They believed there was maybe one or two somewhere in the school. In just 60 years, they disappeared from memory completely. They were invisible. In Barcelona, as we know, there are unknown hundreds of air raid shelters below the city. We know they are unknown. In London, I have surveyed the locations of a project to build huge underground air raid shelters pictured here. Each would hold 12,000 people. This project began in 1938, was cancelled. The shelters were never in fact built. But standing on the grass, standing on the ground above where they would have been created, this absence feels ambiguous. On the surface, they might be there, they might not be there. An archaeological survey of air raid shelters in Australia found that a folklore and folk memory can create inaccurate and imaginative stories of underground spaces that never existed. What exists is more banal than the imagination. Buried heritage can be resistant to study as well. I'm currently studying our shelters in a park in London that have so far resisted all forms of geophysics that I've been able to conduct. But from aerial photographs and from patch marks in the grass, I know they're there. But for now that they are hiding from me in the horrible sticky London clay, I will find them eventually. I know they're there. There are other forms of invisibility of course. I have seen air raid protection of trenches in military camps misidentified as training of trenches. I've seen domestic air raid shelters mistaken for fish ponds. So widespread public ignorance of air raid shelter heritage is a problem for their preservation as well. Despite these three challenges or limiting factors, I see a great deal of exciting potential in the future studies of air raid shelters. There are three themes I'd like to see shape this future research. These are firstly, a hot interpretation. I believe there's a place for emotion in heritage interpretation and we've seen some examples of that this morning. In the history of air warfare, this is particularly relevant. A scientist, JBS Haldane, who visited Spain during the Civil War from England, wrote a book on air raid protection for British readers. And he wrote and says here, I hate having to write this book. Air raids are not only wrong, they're loathsome and disgusting. If you'd ever seen a child smashed by a bomb into something like a mixture of dirty rags and of cat's meat, you would realize this fact as intensely as I do. Some of this anger and disgust should find a place within the study and management of heritage as well. The theme of absence, which I presented above as a challenge is also an opportunity. Absences are spaces for imagination, for speculation, for philosophy and art and architecture and ghost stories. Absences are generative and we can work with them. The final and most vital theme in the study of air raid shelters is internationalism. Firstly, on a practical level, these are international heritage. We know that the catalytic experience of air raids influenced British civil defense policy through the engineer Ramon Pereira, for example. But drawing again on this idea of emotion in heritage, I think there is an internationalism of air raid shelters that connects the experience of terrified children and their parents right now in Kyiv, in Gaza, Syria, Yemen and in the past in Barcelona, Tokyo, Hamburg, elsewhere. To find the universal in these experiences is to break down divisions between people and to focus again on the shared human tragedies, finding human solidarity in histories of violence. So that is my hope for the future of this work. As we were saying, Jordi is a specialist in defense and he knows very well how Barcelona organized defense and I would like you to tell us what Barcelona did to organize the defense. Good afternoon. I'll try to do so. My presentation and I have prepared that will focus on how or what kind of shelters we have. Researchers and papers have considered shelters as something very linked to the civil war. But there were previous constructions also from a legal point of view also and other examples that need to be mentioned. Or for instance the law before the Spanish civil war to see how we get to this defense. So passive defense, the root, we can find it between the two main words in the 20th century, particularly the first world war which set the ground of what would be the passive defense. It's particularly the way of organizing centers to welcome people wounded, particularly during the world war. There are two reasons that make us talk about passive defense which was the aviation, military aviation and gas that caused many deaths during the first world war. The passive defense was aimed at mitigating bombings and the chemical war. Passive defense are the measures that protect civil population from bombings and it's what we have to take into account. And also chemical war. We have presidents and we have the influence coming from different countries, mainly France, that has legislation laws concerning how to instruct the practical defense on November of 31 publishes a law and measures to protect the population. And even decommission the police to put in November some signs about this kind of defense, information for the French population and that's a regulation that Madrid takes into account and the Soviet norms about air raid shelters as well that were built in the 20s and the 30s, how the procedure in these shelters, particularly in 1935 all this information got to Spain and guided how the Spanish shelter would be. The first time we hear about passive defense it was in 1935 and a decree and Catalonia also had some law during the war. It is a new organization or people things were organized differently and here we talk about the passive defense and this morning we were saying whether it's passive defense or civil defense. Here in Spain passive defense it's something that's in the law since 1935 and in 1941 it's called passive defense in the 1960 it's called civil defense so here before we talk passive defense then civil protection and the Spanish constitution and in 1985 passive defense became civil protection and it's what we have now. The passive defense that was approved took place when Franco was in power it was it was the commander of the ministry of war and I'm saying that because oftentimes we think that passive defense is something linked to the republic no both parties had passive defense and I'm going to give you some examples later and this law establishes that local committees and in 1935 and during the civil war and in Barcelona this local committee were organized but this is regulated by the law so what happened is that we inherited this passive defense. Catalonia implemented it in a way Madrid in another and populations with over 8 000 inhabitants organized in this way. There was a mayor president military delegate doctors pharmacists there are different aspects of the organization that were features of this passive defense and then there were there was a training of a specialist that was done during the war to prepare the possible passive defense it's not just air raid shelters passive defense is many things passive defense if we introduce anti aircraft defense or anti air raid defense defense against aircrafts is a royal wither of January 15 1931 so the Spanish state already with a group of anti aircraft artillery they tried to have a potential defense against aircraft and introduced it in the legislation the defense against aircrafts in 1931 is organized around a central unit mainly Madrid and Zaragoza and when the war started an artillery group remain on one side and the other one in the other but active defense goes beyond that we're talking about artillery anti aircraft and these devices to detect attacks based on sound patterns and in passive defense we have shelters but beyond that of course shelters are the main weight of passive defense but also displacing the population to different areas this is an act of passive defense and also obscuring which means controlling electricity and in the case of bombings living all the pollution in the dark this is a mechanism that the Franco regime also used later on and also including sirens and firefighters this would all be included in passive defense and the information service is the information service that controls aircrafts the coming of aircrafts in the area of the Mediterranean they used ships in the Mediterranean to detect ships incoming ships or aircrafts any potential enemy and then they communicated these information to the central these are watch towers or or vigilance centers checkpoints that worked all over the state the information service is also a mythology service it was almost unheard of back in the day because they started the weather conditions so that in the event of weather changes rainfall if the sun shined depending on the time of year they they calculated potential attacks based on that an anti-aircraft defense this is something that started in 1931 these was organized by the republic and during the civil war these was a defense mechanism that they perfected both republicans and the Franco regime and this classification is something that I continue to shift over time but my intention years ago was to try and classify different types of shelters in the state there are many different types of shelters there were many different types here in the civil war almost every city had its own type of shelter but the intention was to classify them it is just a proposal that I've been perfecting over time but it is an overview of this air raid shelters during the war and part of the Franco regime earlier I said in Germania Contel said earlier that bombs no no sites and I will show you some pictures beyond explaining what these shelters are I just wanted to give you an assessment and to generate some debate these are shelters from the Palma de Mallorca island the city of Palma de Mallorca and in July 1936 they received successive and frequent bombings and the population of Palma tried to protect itself from these bombings and the architects and engineers of the island were the ones who for two years participated in the building of these air raid shelters after the civil war they became obsolete and I'm showing them here for a reason because these are shelters built by the rebel army by the rebel side Bartomeo Field wrote a book he did a huge task of analyzing all of these shelters he's a researcher he's no archaeologist and he has listed all of these shelters and they have a program now a memory policy program of the Balearic island government who've been working intensely on research beyond the island of Palma because during the civil war the entire island worked on creating these shelters but they belong to the rebel side and most of them are quite similar they are built of concrete and they're similar to the republican shelters and the Spanish Falange I don't know if you can see the black book but they also published a booklet explaining these how to how these air raid shelters were to be and I'm showing this because what we're thinking about they're thinking about what to do with this heritage in Majorca they think they're that they need to be opened up to the public and explained and it's just one more piece of what happened in the island the republican bombings in the island and the comparison with the bombings by the Italians and the condom region or the the the intensity of the of the bombings was much higher than that of the republican bombings and another example is Maun for a short time now they've been working and doing research at different groups different organizations to support the memory of Manorca different engineers researchers are developing a very significant task mainly for the council of Manorca and now they have commissioned a study on these shelters but Manorca was republican was on the republican side and the difference between islands is quite obvious these are tunnels created by people linked to the mining profession and I think Javier also said before that there were people who slept here in these shelters there weren't many bombings in Manorca and it is true that many people lived in these shelters and what we are seeing through archaeology and the study of these tunnels these under tunnels mainly in Maun is showing these these memories is true about these memories children went down to play in the shelters so we are we're trying to recover these these memories and another case is the Santander shelters 114 shelters in the city of Santander there is a very relevant one which has become a museum the one you can see in the picture Mariana Pineda which was built for three months it was a quick operation it was made of concrete a team of architects participated and I'm showing this precisely because I don't know if you know it if you know this shelter but they were very quick building it during a bombing in the city they they built it and subsequently it was abandoned and in 1941 there was a fire in the city and they forgot about it and in 2006 they recovered it and they turned it into a museum and I don't know if you know this but they have a permanent exhibit there are two plaques of two dead pilots of the connor legion who died in Santander there is a 250 kilo bomb a german bomb which was given by the aeronautical museum in spain and they play around with this symbiosis they have pictures for example of furniture toys and amongst this military environment and I'm I'm showing these here to talk about how in different areas of the country they use these shelters differently another shelter another place where there were many shelters was Madrid it was the front line it was the front line for around 29 months the bombings were mainly in november 1936 and since april 1937 they devised a plan to build aerate shelters in the capital city and they started building lots of shelters but the concept in Madrid and I wanted to propose these mainly for the debate Madrid cannot operate only with aerate shelters it doesn't work because it's a front line and because civil shelters coexist with military shelters and there are different military settlements different machine gun nests and bunkers and they work as a unit and of course it is a capital of the state and it operates with active and passive defense jointly the publisher of Madrid was in different neighborhoods there were civil shelters but also military shelters and bunkers to face the different attacks and another example of these types of shelters and talking about signposting and graffiti in the shelters I think archaeology is a discipline that should identify these graffiti and these different types of shelters but everything should work as a whole memory history archaeology should go hand in hand in the identification of these shelters the shelter in Wadix Wadix is in Granada and it is a very important communication hub in the southeast of the peninsula and the shelters there were studied many years ago they thanks to the will of the civil society some more shelters have been opened up and they show them from a very educational perspective the big attraction of Wadix is the cathedral and the aerate shelter just to give you an example of this type and then in Nuwana Villanueva de Córdoba this one was built in the first few months of 1938 and it comes from a commission by Aldo Morandia an Italian high commander who created a program of aerate shelters mainly as a space to shelter 32,000 people from a town which at the time had 16,000 inhabitants and what conflict do I see personally in this type of shelter like the one in Villanueva de Córdoba it had a population of 16,000 inhabitants but the program was for 32,000 people it was supposed to hold 32,000 people because all of the refugees from the Andalusian fields were to use these shelters and after the civil war they found many shelters in Villanueva de Córdoba a town which at the moment has around 8,000 inhabitants but in order to understand this we need to understand the concept of the refugees who took shelter in these shelters there was also an aerate shelter in Hain which was bombed by the Condor Legion in 1937 with 159 victims of this bombing most of them children if I remember correctly it was a Thursday afternoon and many children were playing out on the streets and this was April 1st and on April 2nd the Republican Town Council and this is quite famous in the city of Hain Javier Campos of the republican side back then ordered that almost all of the almost all the the entire population were to start building these shelters and then in a very short period of time they started building these shelters and in Almería Almería is very important in order to understand these shelters and the people who took shelter there and finally just to mention graffiti and what to do with material culture this was the military position of Quipiano Mera a shelter that caused many legal problems because it's a bit far from the city center people have stolen materials and materials are now dispersed and they've closed it on occasion and I'm showing it mainly because I wanted to talk about what to do with these materials and to have a debate with you about that thank you very much Jordi we've been talking about invisibility how to integrate the overall narrative into the story of these shelters Jordi has been telling us about several shelters in Spain and Miquel Mesquida will tell us about Valencia what has been done in Valencia to get back these shelters and what heritage value is being given to these shelters and how make the story of the shelters public first of all I would like to thank the Barcelona City Council and the organizers for having invited me 20 years ago I came here only to be beaten in rugby games here in La Fosharda but now I'm going to tell you about what we are trying to do in the Valencia region concerning shelters historical context maybe I don't need to tell you a lot about it after the coup d'etat we know that in the area of Valencia that become an important asset to bomb to terrorize population we know that Mallorca from Mallorca the the aircraft departed to bomb Cartagena Almería and all this coast aligned the bombing start in October 36 Cartagena Barcelona November 36 Almería January 37 Valencia January 37 and it's a machinery that goes on and on till the end of the war and Valencia is a clear example Shatiba will suffer a very terrible attack in 1937 39 sorry and we can have data it has already been mentioned that building shelters was something important and many people died despite all these shelters along the coastline and we're working on that only in Valencia in the city of Valencia and I we think that we might have 350 shelters we think that more than here it's written 300 we think more than 300 637 days of bombing of different ports in the Valencia region and over 1800 victims we have identified and known identify 500 dead people in Valencia after 150 days of bombing several bombing sometimes per day and Alicante as well 490 victims I will try to tell you what's been done in the Valencia region here you have the bibliography we have the main specialist Pepper has a couple of posters that he's presented and I would like to talk about the legal framework that we have in the Valencia region at the national level we have laws concerning heritage and democratic memory but it's true that in the Valencia region we have this double protection because the law on heritage included remnants from the war and the city councils now are taking or are registering all these objects and some city councils were already working on this register that includes the heritage from the civil war so from 2017 with the law on memory that protects the memorial places but also the remnants from the war and as I was telling you Valencia include or included already eight shelters in 2015 the Valencia region until eight years ago everything related to archaeology from civil war was forbidden because of political reasons in that region and talking about civil war was something completely forgotten and people working on this topic had to work in Aragon or in other places where the law on memory had already been implemented and until 2015 in the Valencia region there was no work done on civil war heritage and showing it to the public practical cases or examples in the last eight years we have been working on shelters in the main villages and towns in Castellon Valencia Alicante here we have examples Castellon the Duana square in Valencia we have several shelters in schools and sometimes the teachers in those highest schools have worked on them and had created some visits and thanks to the resources given by the department by the department of transparency and democratic culture several shelters there are studies about several shelters in different places in the region if we talk about Valencia city there are three shelters that can be visited and there is in one a permanent exhibition explaining the situation then we can visit that shelter it's located in a place that used to be the headquarters of the government then we have public shelters and another one in a place nearby Valencia after years and years without being able to do anything on the civil war being able to work on the shelter was a big pleasure and to organize a specific exhibition was an incredible experience the works in the shelter located in the town hall started with a study of the walls then we did following of the archaeological studies and then we gave a value to the shelter by organizing a permanent and a temporary exhibition at Cara the historian helped us organize the exhibition and the exhibition was there for a year when we visited the shelter in the town hall for the first time the politics in the town hall had changed a few months before our visit and it was the shelter was a kind of a storage room here we had people that had put things on the wall someone lots of papers from the previous mayor of Valencia and here we had pictures pens forgotten there in the shelter 30 years before when and phones that looked like phones from the Second World War we could access the documents that were stored there as well and now they are in the Valencia archive and we started to do tests on the wall to see what was left from the original shelter because the space had been painted the floor had been redone so we did some tests on the walls and we could see that it was painted the original shelter was painted we could find also air ducts and we could also see the original floor the we thought that the original floor wouldn't be in a good condition but it was and we could find also material from that time like a piece of newspaper and a couple of tram tickets that probably had the people who made the floor of the shelter that was the first stage then we do an archaeological follow-up we were doing study of this shelter and we could find the hole of the engine and the air channeling in some cases the engine was preserved but here we couldn't find it we found the toilet the pipe that was there and the benches and that that were no longer there because they had taken them out to put shelters then with the original colors that we found in the shelter we try to restore the place to its original state here the light we never agreed on the lighting because people doing the security plans and the lightning sometimes they think that they think this is a nightclub instead of a civil war shelter but sometimes we have to make concessions we found that the vaults had this color and we tried to go back to the origin of the shelter or get the shelter to its original state this coincides with the renovation of part of the town hall that was the access to the shelter there were offices for civil servants and it has been turned into an area that can be visited right now and this is part of the exhibition that we organized some of the works that we did can be seen here in the posters that Pepe has prepared and others you can see here about the different types that Jordi Ramos has mentioned here we have so the government shelters and the school shelters are another type and that was a shelter similar to the one we work in the town hall building this is one of the last images here we have a video with oral witness of people who experience who lived experience the bombings and some conclusions it's clear that memory politics are needed to carry out these works and without political will it's very difficult to carry out these kind of works because we need financing and we have seen that we have suffered this situation of lack of political will in the valentia region and let's see what happens in may with the new elections and we have to give value to the archaeologist and the work he or she does because it's very much needed when we talk about heritage and what has been mentioned emotions are also very important but we have also to work the scientific and historical aspects because otherwise we would be given a partial version of what happened thank you very much for listening to me thank you very much Miguel you introduce very important topics such as for example this controversy of the dependent on the ruling party and some programs run out of funding what is restored and how and how shelters co-exist with current heritage tell us about what was done in Barcelona and Miguel was telling us about the preservation policy or the policy in this sense and they will tell us about the legislation and how these shelters are protected I don't know if they all need to be protected or not and also what is the policy whether they are restored or not and whether there is a clear legislation in this regard so you have the floor good afternoon we are representatives of the archaeology service we are employees of the archaeology service this is a municipal body which depends on the Barcelona town council and as she said we will tell you a bit about our work vis-à-vis shelters but before that let me give you a spoiler there is one person in this room who she tells us about something it is important that she does so but she has to leave so do remember what we're going to say now what Jean-Marie Mendez is going to say now she is the territorial archaeologist of Barcelona representative of the Catalan government in this matter and it will be nice for her to give us to make this comment Gemma as we agreed this morning we were sitting down next to one another and after hearing the opening speech I said to Montserrat that all shelters at least in Barcelona since we have spoken so well about the Barcelona case I'm here not from the point of view of the Catalan government but as an archaeologist who has been working 14 to 2 years I think they should be protected as a cultural good of national interest the top category in the legislation and I'm referring here to the competencies of the Catalan organization and I think that local protection is very good and the Valenci initiative is very nice but sometimes all of these actions of one group of the citizenship should be protected to the highest level allowed by the legislation and we were talking to Montserrat and saying that it's difficult because to start with we don't even know how many shelters we have or where they are but it wouldn't be a first because for example in the case of a cave paintings there is for example a generic declaration for example all areas with cave paintings are considered national interest heritage and in our case for example in the case of the Mediterranean coast we made them into world heritage so it would be an interesting topic to because the law we must take into account that the regional laws are within the framework of the historic heritage at the level of Spain so they are kind of constricted and the regulation was passed by a general manager who was an archaeologist Manuel Fernández Miranda and he was very careful and this is why we have these archaeological zones which was something unthinkable before to block things down but we should also bear in mind that we were in the midst of the transition so we were there was no concern with protecting these types of heritage but also it would have been unthinkable to have these types of initiatives because they were trying to cover up this part of history which was still too recent so I do need to leave I can say for a few minutes but my proposal is that I don't know if this should come from here this morning Guichel and Domenic talked as well and well we would like for these shelters to be considered under the top category that the law allows it is a different topic that can be looked at from different perspective it could be immaterial or material heritage it could be both we have built areas which is what we call monuments still well for me it's very clear I know what I would do and from the administration technically it can be done that's what I wanted to say and I'm sorry I cannot stay to see whether this proposal is then carried into the debate I will tell you about it I don't know if I should wait or where our talk is coordinated with Tavin he had to leave for a minute but well from my ignorance I'm not an archaeologist but so what you're asking is for the protection of the entire network of shelters or some specific shelters or how would that work the entire the entire network of shelters your blood test but she's not using the mic at the moment despite not knowing their scope their amount their status because they may be in ruins okay thank you I don't know what to do shall we yeah we shall start well this talk was only coordination with him but we'll start otherwise we won't have time for the debate later so well for those of you who do not know the archaeology service of Barcelona I'll give you a brief overview of the service where we are and as a goal in the broader sense of the word the archaeology service which is over the archaeological heritage of the city the city understood as one single field site and these sessions for example here today are an example the archaeological study provides data for the recovery of our recent history and here we're giving you a brief overview a bit of an exercise on memory spaces of the civil war here in Barcelona that we have recovered ever since the first shelter 307 reopened in Poplasec we could say that in the 90s with the discovery of the Plaza de Diamant a shelter revolution square shelter and the documentation and intervention in shelter 307 this was like an awakening and the public was made aware of the existence and in some cases the opening of some of these shelters in the year 2000 the archaeology service had a before and after because it was the first intervention in the Villa de Madrid square shelter an intervention with an archaeological methodology as a way of working with these heritage and then Tavi who is his back Tavi will give us more information about this concept and in 2009 these were the first sessions the ones before this one this was 14 years ago and time goes by so quickly as we were saying and now we are the heirs who have to continue with this task that has been placed on the table and that we now have to continue with and back then the archaeology service organized an internal session on the materials that we recuperate from the shelters what to do with it how to rehabilitate it what criteria to follow and in 2011 the entire aircraft's battery opened and then between 2015 and 2017 there was a whole work of research and discovery of the holding cells in the Montjuïc castle in three out of five and the corridor we found more than 650 graffiti not all of them belonging to the period of the civil war but most of them do belong to that period and let me say something thinking of Alessante who this morning claimed the role of women in all these and I wanted to mention at least Valerie Powell's who is no longer with us and on March 8th a small square received her name also to remember this leader of the neighborhood movement in Poblasec to make the shelter known and she was the and as Montserrat said she was giving you an overview of the artwork in the past few years and in the period between the year 2000 and 2023 the archaeology service has inventoried 93 shelters there are many more of course and there have been archaeological interventions in 34 with preventative interventions a team of archaeologists has worked on shelters some of them have been preserved from others have not they're very different cases and out of these shelters that can be visited in Barcelona at the moment there are four shelter 307 managed by the Museum of History Plaza del Diamant in the neighborhood of Gracia La Lira in San Andreo which is a private shelter privately managed and also Mas Guinardó the Orta Guinardó district and shortly Torra de la Segreira will open to the public and also Plaza de la Revolución en Gracia and the archaeology service does not only focus on shelters we also focus on other elements related to the Spanish Civil War such as batteries anti-aircraft batteries we try to make inventories with the subsoil unit of the Catalan police they have a poster here and we try to make an inventory of elements of the civil war and in 2017 when a tree fell it uncovered a hole I went in with them and we discovered the coastal battery in Jaume I which was a battery from the civil war built on two levels it is completely whole it was built completely but it was never used and it's an element of the civil war that never actually worked but it's part of our heritage and finally with the Catalan police we have a collaboration agreement in 2017 to be able to enter air reach shelters safely but we've been working with them since 2013 if I'm not mistaken in a summarized manner the first bombing was in 13 on the 13th of February 1937 by the Orgenida Savoye ship an Italian destructor and then start in March 1937 we started suffering the bombings of the fascist Italian fascist aviation with a lot of anxiety 200 bombings 2700 dead 7000 injured which led to a civil and republican effort to build shelters in the city of Barcelona and in this sense well I'm getting ahead but these 1322 shelters that we've all been mentioning this is a census of course we don't know whether they were all built and in Barcelona we have documented many public ones there are also private ones and in June 1937 the passive defense board of Catalonia was created Jordan already talked about this I will not get into detail and as I said before out of those 1322 we have not located as many much less every year we've located new ones with these preventative archaeological interventions and out of these 1300 many are private Anna did a lot of work locating many private shelters the problem is that they mistrust us they mistrust public administration they don't want to have anything to do with us because they think that if we go them to inventory them to know them they believe that we will make them do things that they don't want to do or we will take hold of the shelters so sometimes I go there as an assistant I don't say that I don't come from the archaeology I don't say that I come from the archaeology service because they may think I'm the devil and they don't want me in there so I just go there as her assistant to take pictures of these shelters their private shelters in Sarriagracia districts that we have not been able to access yet and our intention is to document them and include them in our inventory of shelters but as you can see there's a lot of work to be done in this sense this is the map of the census of 1938 with these 1322 all over Barcelona and these I will mention very briefly because Jordi already explained it and Miguel as well in Barcelona we see underground stations train stations used the shelters and newly built there were trenches in streets and squares and then cellular shelters like the one under the Tuán Square which were built with concrete and then the most regular type 85% of shelters in Barcelona are the ones of the mine gallery type the shaft type they're very very solid and the subsoil is very solid so they could excavate in depth and make safe shelters in Barcelona's underground and then in other areas there were open-air shelters with concrete that were built out and you open and covered with concrete and the shelters can also be public or private and there are some belonging to neighbor associations most of those included in the 1938 census also factory shelters like the one from the Elizalde factory F-14 and another one that I visited in La Barneda street in San Mati district which was also built under a factory also domestic or private shelters there are hundreds of those in Barcelona belonging to the neighbors of the building who did not want to be a part of the community civil efforts of the population to create public shelters and they make public shelters for themselves or for their association of neighbors there are many like those like the one in Mallorca street this one is spectacular very well preserved lodge to shelter the people of a very large building and finally institutional shelters such as the one of the Catalan parliament that turned the photograph back in the day and now we will talk about different examples of shelters and the work done yes at the moment we are working on some of them to open them up to the public one is this in La Sagrera Tarrzawa in the neighborhood of San Andreu look if you have a brief overview you can see here that this is a large shelter that was accessed via this house at the bottom and at the moment we are working basically on the structure a survey has been conducted because opening up a space like this to the public means that we need to ensure that it's stable especially for visitors and we've encountered some surprises meaning that structure specialists have seen that the vibrations of the street may make the structure collapse we are now placing pavement a pavement that can work well with the entire structure of the floors and the ceilings to withhold the vibrations it was a surprise it was a shock because we thought well we will barely have to do anything and in the end we had to do a lot of work these are some pictures of this shelter which is quite well it is a mine shaft white elaborate it is covered with with concrete and there were columns to hold the benches we have not found the wooden benches which is more difficult to preserve and we have not found any trace of it there were latrines as well here a detail of the the light fixtures and some remains that we found and this is some of the previous work that we've done we've preserved all of this because now there are quite many people working there and we've made sure that no one will drop or break these fixtures and these elements and i will give you more information about other things we have found in a minute this is one of the shelters that chawi was telling you about one of the institutional shelters it was the shelter of the catalan government this does not mean that it is directly under the palace it's so to speak outside and it is all made of concrete you can see the the design there are separation walls yes if you allow me one second there are different posters here of basalona and here on this side there is one poster about the sagrada tower shelter and the catalan parliament shelter and yes the what we did was that the wiring for the lighting was on the floor and we've repositioned it we've studied where it was where it should have been and we've repositioned it we've found pieces of fabric that we have restored and some shoes personal effects jewels not much really and same thing here some graffiti some pictures this is one of those that i said were found under factories it is very well preserved i would say for now no interventions are planned same perspective this is another type of shelter well this one it's just for you to see that there are many types of shelters in basalona in the different status and this for example is shelter 722 but this does not mean that all of them were built because in this case they encountered some loose substrate and they could not continue excavating and they had to stop construction so it was not built in the end and now if we go into the study of materials rehabilitation i would like to tell you about those sessions we organized in 2009 and and so based on that in our current experience we've already discussed that the shelters after the war were closed up and normally now when we go back in we find pockets of waste materials or we could say rather than waste building materials mixed with rubble and we assume that they were placed there just before walling in the map and locking the map so when we try to interpret the materials that we find whether these materials were used in the shelter or not when we find this rubble we discard it because we consider it was just rubble that was placed there after the fact it seems like a very basic thing to say but until you've seen quite a few of them you do not realize this is the case there are plaques for example that we've tried to recuperate if you have the opportunity to go to the exhibition we took this one out and it's it has been restored and it's difficult because these materials and linings are materials that were prepared very quickly and there are no layers that allow you to to repair them these are very delicate operations preserving for example a comb may sound silly to you but i will tell you that it is not a silly thing it is talking to us about at time where new materials were used this is the first plastic recovered from an archaeological intervention and you may not be able to see it but it says hamburg new york i think it's 1924 so it's important to stop and think before you discard materials in this case it was it was easy it was clear to all of us that we had to keep that but in these cases it was not so easy all of these bottles for example some say oh these i can find them by the dozen in my grandparents attic but you need to be able to to attach the necessary meaning to these objects to think twice and recuperating them means taking on preservation and maintenance and this means a lot of money a lot of money that we don't always have so a reflection on the criteria and what will be preserved and what will be done with it is necessary because we need to be responsible this is a part of the things that we find this is another part of the things that we find this is something that we found on the internet and this is for sale and it may be very interesting to to obtain because this is something that we will not find in a shelter is that it is an armband with the name of the person you belong to yes the area of heritage of Barcelona but this is um for example the battery that we found in manduig the catalan police i mentioned them before we have been working with them since well 2013 there is a poster here and and you can ask them any questions you have without them we would not be able to access many of the shelters different risks falls lack of oxygen pollutants collapsing ceilings it's dangerous and finally dissemination inventory dissemination of the heritage of the civil war specifically shelters this is our website of shelters i encourage you to to visit it it contains a lot of information and we continue to add new information every day there is a lot to do and it's always difficult to to have enough time to add all of the new information but we do everything we can to update it on a daily basis and finally the novelty is that now we can show these shelters because 90% of the cases people cannot access them because of the poor state risk of falls collapsing so what we've done is based on the archaeological interventions we've been documented all shelters with a laser scanner whenever it's feasible whenever they are in a good status when they're not collapsed so when they're in the optimal conditions they are laser scanned and then a 3d model is created that we incorporated very recently onto our website it takes a bit long to load this is the valencia street shelter that we excavated the million is the archaeological who documented it and this is the latest 3d model that we have of a Barcelona shelter it is heavy it takes a long time to load especially on wi-fi but just for you to see what we want to do with all air raid shelters in Barcelona at the archaeology department we always want to give context of the urban environment for people to understand the shelter the shelter without its urban context is is useless it does not give you an image of volume of context and so very briefly i'll note this when here we can access it we show a picture that can be enlarged so you can see the picture taken from the same perspective you can navigate here it's better to do with a mouse i don't want to get into it now but while you can move around easily you can see different areas of the shelter different gallery accesses a latrine there were many found in in Barcelona in different shelters quite common a second level of a shelter with different levels in Barcelona another access and this is the future of the archaeology service we want to document the different shelters and disseminate them because otherwise they will remain in our heart drives and no one will get to know them thank you very much oh sorry sorry sorry sorry one more thing we're not done we're not done well no we're not done because this is one way of showing shelters virtually but there's still demand among citizens that we open shelters to the public the public visits and the one at la sagrera that i mentioned and the one at the revolution square in gracia if everything goes well they will be open to the public this summer visits will be organized and we were excited to tell you that for us opening up these these shelters is and i think this is what's inspired of this morning's session it's like making it possible for people to feel the past not just seeing it but feeling it for us it's important not to change many things in the shelters just trying to preserve this this atmosphere of austerity loneliness and maybe despair even if any of you just close your eyes for a second so this visit that we will be opening of these two shelters the proposal was that the museum elements are found outside before you access a shelter and you experience the experience and something that happened inadvertently was that when we were trying to see how to turn the shelter a person to the museum it is a very large shelter but only the infirmary was preserved and we thought well it's ideal because it was a necessary space in shelters it was recommended to to have it for the care of those taking shantel de ver and for people to have these place to receive treatment and we also know that it was a time in which medicine advanced very quickly it leaps and bounds i think you all know dr. tuetta and his methods during the second war with the treatment of injuries and other things so we thought well it will be ideal in this shelter not to talk about the war because we talk about the war in shelter 307 it seems like it's like we resort to we always talk about the war but there's not that much to talk about so we thought okay here we will try to talk about care healthcare everything it involved back then and it was done inside the shelters and this led us to saying well it will be ideal that if we open up shelters maybe not i don't know 25 but maybe one per district so if we open them to the public maybe we can complement different aspects revolving around the civil war and all of them together these entire network or route or whatever you want to call it together with monjuic dura de la rubira and all these other spaces that we already have can give you an idea of the civil war and what it represented and what it was for Barcelona and this is where these ideas stems from we said let's not create a museum of the civil war let's establish that our shelters will be devoted to monographic areas and all of them together will make up a museum that you can go through going through the entire city and let me close by saying that these links with the very first session that was organized and this plan was already written back then and i found a piece of news published about those sessions i don't know if he's here now he was here this morning and he said the book is the product of two sessions to decide what to do with shelters in Barcelona and he says what differentiates these publication is the differentiation of what is being or the comparison of what is being done in Barcelona in catalonia with what is being done hold on i apologize i think it is worth it to read it with what is being done in other european countries to draw conclusions in order to try and have a network of shelters that can be visited that will allow the new generations to really understand what the civil war was like so i'm not saying anything new i'm rereading things and we only try to find a way to do to make it true and so let's see if the democratic memorial the archaeologist's service and everyone involved let's see if amongst all of us we can organize a panel a task force to work along those lines if you agree and we'll stop here thank you we've heard several announcements such as have a network of shelters that can be visited i don't know if beside the two you have announced there are others gabriel was mentioning at the beginning the importance of including the emotional part the experience lived also michelle mentioned the scientific knowledge to include that and we've seen examples of different shelters and before opening the qna session i would like if we talk about these possible you were saying of not doing a lot and but we have a generation that didn't experience that period and grandparents who live this period are dying so how can we convey all the events that happen to this younger generation that won't be able to listen the stories from their grandparents how to convey this experience and the horror lived all the objects that you have found how are you gonna exhibit them how do we make these objects known to the larger audience i don't know if one of our speakers wants to answer the questions i don't know the new generations for me have so much information and images and we have so many films as well so i would tell them visit this space close your eyes and think about everything you've seen and you know and that should be enough um Gabrielle moshenska was mentioning the folklore around uh shelters so i don't like to put problems and uh objects in the shelters i am because i've seen these and i don't like it and i think that entering the shelter is very emotional i don't know if um we should add the the testimony of people who experience that when we go into a museum into a shelter sorry if we should include the witness the testimony i think there are um for any of the worker of this kind you need a proper a communication strategy to to identify different audiences young people students families and to and to evaluate what is the most effective means of communicating with each of these audiences work with teachers work with schools i think um i think we are maybe underestimating young people's ability here to use imagination to be excited about these ideas of spaces beneath their feet i think there is enough interest there we don't need to fill them with interactive digital toys i think we can do this as i mentioned as well that this is connected with the contemporary world young people are aware there are wars occurring today wars that are impacting on people their age that they can understand this they can empathize and this is these are tools that we we can use for interpreting this heritage the problem here is that the kind of shelters we have in barcelona or valencia or in the uk or in berlin are very different here in barcelona we have mine galleries 30 percent or 20 percent are in a bad condition so accessing these shelters is very complicated it's not possible for security reasons and because it's too risky so the technological means are useful for that to use them in spaces where we can only access with the police us and the rest but the rest of the population cannot visit these places so we have to strike a balance between the shelters that we can visit that will not be many and the rest must be accessible by digital means it's a different way of visiting this heritage i think someone had the question oh my name is samaria contero i think that the panel has been a very good one because we have heard different perspectives giordi ramos was telling us about madrid is true and this morning we were talking about bombings and we think about aircraft but bombings have been existed for 300 years because we can bomb in many different ways and madrid was was bombed by cannons and nothing was flying so there were no sirens going off and we've seen that in the ukraine too so madrid was generated a special kind of shelters in valencia also there were different shelters i know them i don't know uh london uh barcelona and so it was very interesting i like monserrat saying that uh uh not everything that we find in uh shelters is rubble uh no well shelters had to be very clean because the passive defense board said that the shelters had to be clean but when they were closed many people went in and started making fire uh throwing things in there and among the garbage that we can find are pieces that can be interesting and i think monserrat explained that very well and uh it was mentioned uh valeri powells the british citizen that i think that the town council the officials at the city council didn't treat her well and i'm happy that now there is a square with her name i met her it was a woman and that the administration thought that she was a nuisance she did the administration the authorities local authorities uh didn't listen to her and uh but she did a very important work so thank you for mentioning her and there is a conflict because you said that for the shelter in diamano square was found in uh 92 no it was i don't think that the date i think we should agree on the date where this shelter was found because i thought it was 99 other questions many things an observation it has been mentioned about folklore and this dichotomy between emotions and science i think that is part of the archaeology i think that the study of emotions are part of the narratives and archaeology is something that takes into account and i think that establishing this dichotomy between emotions and science doesn't help i focus on how subsoil and shelters have reproduced tensions that we could be in the surface the the shelters were also a battleground they were different projects proposals different ways of constructing different conflicts that took place and i would like to mention that it's not possible to preserve all shelters maybe we should preserve the ones that have better structural conditions i think 3d projects are very good but the personal experience cannot be compared to the virtual experience and i think that there are uh technical means and budget probably because this soft 3d software probably spends cost a lot of money but i think that maybe 50 square meters or 100 square meters could be preserved we have engineers here that could achieve this that to make these spaces safe why this body experience is important and maybe and as it has been said the shelter several activities can be can read out in the shelters but these shelters could become also climate shelters and now we talk about libraries for instance where there is air conditioning during the summer maybe the shelters could be also climate shelters or future war shelters for future wars that and sadly might occur i think there was a question or remark i don't know if you want answer this if we could give another use for a shelters as a climate shelters for instance or libraries as i was saying in Barcelona we have few shelters that have optimal conditions to be open to the public in many have parts which collapse and it would cost a lot a lot of money to repair these places to be make them accessible to the public these confined spaces it's very complicated and it requires lots of money climate shelters to work as a library or climate well the shelters in Barcelona are so narrow it's difficult the examples in berlin or london that are larger shelters maybe that could be different but here except a couple of shelters the others are one meter wide so that would be difficult to turn them into climate shelters thank you can i can i respond on the point of a a embodied experience the experience of physically being in the shelter compared to experiencing it virtually i think this is incredibly powerful the feeling of being deep underground the temperature humidity the acoustics these are very very distinctive experience i have uh is part of my work i do oral history interviews with people who have who who were using the air age shelters i'm excavating in some cases i've been able to conduct interviews within those shelters these are completely different interviews the a smell even of the being underground sparks different memories more intense memories it's incredibly powerful i think for those people who are interested in visiting shelters and let's be honest we're all interested the public maybe five percent are interested of those 99 out of 100 they want to visit one shelter that's enough but it's important then that this is a this is a embodied proper experience for the for the rest of us we can play with digital models as well these are wonderful but they are not for the the the public i think maybe we could find a middle way between the body experience and a virtual experience the middle work with the um bridge creek that of the imperial war museum and i've done the experience in a shelter here in Barcelona and a shelter at the imperial war museum and it's fantastic the experience there because children can experience that they don't have the experience of complete reality but for children it's very good to be able to listen to the sounds of a real attack the problem here and i know it's very complicated but have 100 security when we go in with children it's complicated but maybe we could make an effort to allow these children to go into the shelters for them to understand that their grandparents were there your colleague from the department of archaeology has left but for us that we have been fighting for a chapel and this is not related but that these shelters are declared an asset of national interest that would be very interesting thank you more questions if you want our panelists want to add something make a remark if i can be a bit uh provocative how many shelters do we need here but right now i mean there are already shelter museums are they unable to deal with a number of visitors do we need to open more to deal with the huge demand for visitors i don't think so will we have enough perhaps the rest study them record them carefully digitally leave them alone we have enough what are we trying to create with this employment for our for ourselves that's fine but you know maybe this is enough just yeah