Residents of Besòs and Maresme are outraged by the library's name change.

Barcelona"It hurts me that no one has contacted me or informed me, and I also don't understand why they want to change the name, because my grandfather hasn't done anything wrong. It's absurd," says Adela Alòs-Moner, librarian and cleaner at the Ramon d'Alòs-Moner Library. Adela laments that the city council wants to change the name of the library that bears her grandfather's name. The residents' association of the Besòs i el Maresme neighborhood in Barcelona also disagrees, having issued a statement expressing their incomprehension: "We do not agree that the Ramon de Alòs-Moner Library should change its name when it is moved to the new building on Alfonso el Magnánimo Street. Rather, we believe that this change is motivated by a unilateral decision on the part of the Sant Martí district and the Memory and Gender Commission," they assert. The name of Ana María Matute came up at a meeting of the Consell de Barris (Neighborhood Council). "We were told this was the proposed name and that the residents hadn't been consulted. We fought hard to make the history known, and in 1970, it was very difficult to name a library after a Republican," says José Manuel López, president of the residents' association.

"I think it's great that they're naming libraries after women because they're underrepresented, but they should name it after this woman and remove my grandfather's name?" says Adela Alòs-Moner. The library was established in 1970 in the Besòs i el Maresme neighborhood, in the Sant Martí district. It was formerly located in a building belonging to the Housing Authority, in Plaça Maria Nazària March, and when the Besòs i el Maresme Civic Center was built in 1994, it occupied one of the floors of the facility.

Ramon d'Alòs-Moner (1885-1939) was one of the organizers of the First International Congress of the Catalan Language (1906), which contributed to increasing the prestige of Catalan worldwide, among other things. He was Secretary General of the IEC (Institute for Catalan Studies), a professor at the School of Librarians, and an assistant at the Library of Catalonia. His research focused on two 13th-century Catalan figures: Ramon Llull and the theologian and physician Arnau de Vilanova. His family donated his library, consisting of some 20,000 volumes, to the Library of Catalonia and Pompeu Fabra University.

"In these times of historical amnesia, we are surprised that they are removing the name of someone like Ramon d'Alòs-Moner from their library directory. He transformed his home, Torre Garcini, into a meeting place for Catalan nationalist intellectuals and anti-Francoists during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera," laments the residents' association. "We oppose this name change because it obscures part of the neighborhood's history, which we have worked so hard to pass on to the residents. We have always championed figures like Ramon Alòs-Moner, who deeply felt the defeat of his country with the coup against the democratic government of the Republic," they stated in a press release. Alòs-Moner died of a heart attack two weeks after Franco's victory. According to the Barcelona Library Consortium, the Sant Martí district is working "on a proposal that has the necessary consensus, but nothing has been decided yet." The Consortium has declined to comment further. When Adela Alòs-Moner contacted the Consortium to inquire about the name change, the Barcelona Provincial Council responded that "the naming of libraries in the Network is the responsibility of the city councils." They added: "Consequently, there is no general written rule from the Barcelona Provincial Council regulating the cases in which a library's name can be changed."