Those executed at Camp de la Bota now have an iron "brush" so no one forgets them.

BarcelonaIt has been, according to the artist Francesc Abad, a "long and hard" struggle, but finally this Monday the Forest of footprints, with numerous representatives of Catalan and Spanish institutions, relatives of victims of the dictatorship, and the Quartet Brossa. The art installation, in Sant Adrià de Besòs, commemorates the 1,706 people shot by Franco's regime. Made up of 1,686 iron tubes arranged in 36 rows, it is inspired by the phrase written by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had to leave Germany in 1933, with the rise of Hitler, and died in a hotel room in Portbou on September 26, 1940. For this reason, it has the shape of a brush with the bristles pointing upwards. The installation's neighbors are students from the UPC campus, the Mina neighborhood, the Besòs Thermal Power Plant, and the Ronda Litoral.

On the parapet of Campo de la Bota, a concrete wall that jutted into the sea, the condemned, their feet sunk in the water, fell onto the sand. The bodies were then transferred to the Montjuïc massacre. The sea gradually gained ground, and with the works of the Forum of Cultures in 2004, any vestige of the parapet disappeared beneath the waters of the Port Esportiu. That year, Abad began to demand that the memory of all those executed be made visible. The artist, who launched a project to recover the testimony of the families of those executed and held an exhibition at the MACBA, already In 2019, a 55-meter-long wall was inaugurated with the names of all those shot.

The president of the Association for the Memory of Those Sacrificed for the Freedom of Catalonia, Josep Francesc Colomer, representing the families of the victims, expressed his gratitude for the memory of those executed, but also lamented that many other victims have died without seeing the crimes of Franco's regime finally investigated judicially. "Those executed were innocent and did not flee into exile because their hands were not stained with blood and They were most concerned that their sons and daughters could walk with their heads held high", he assured. Colomer also recalled some other demands such as that of Via Laietana, a space where many anti-Franco fighters were tortured.

The president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, criticized the "lukewarmness of European democracies" when Franco carried out the coup d'état and has carried out the coup d'état and has carried out the coup d'état we put our values and the future at stake and we do not want young people to ask us in the future why we did not put a stop to the barbarity," added the president, who especially thanked the presence of the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García OrtizThe Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez López, read the speech by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, who was absent due to medical reasons. Martínez highlighted the fact that the monument is on the "outskirts" and criticized politicians who trivialize the graves. "It's not a simple memorial; it's an art lesson that engages in dialogue with history and urban space," he asserted.

"We have many ways to combat the far right and fascism, and one of them is memory, symbols, historical rigor, and not allowing fake news. We must do everything possible to ensure that this doesn't happen again and that Franco's regime or any other dictatorship isn't whitewashed," asserted the Mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Coll.

The mayor of Sant Adrià, Filo Cañete, wanted to remember Joan Callau, who was mayor from 2013 to 2021 and who died in July of last year. Callau called for this memorial and also an interpretation center about Camp de la Bota, which, for the moment, has not been built. The condemned prisoners were usually summoned by the officers of the Modelo prison between 9 and 10 p.m., when their shift ended, and were led to the chapel. They were then handed over to the firing squad that would take them to Camp de la Bota. Once there, the soldiers led the condemned prisoners to the wall, where they were executed. Camp de la Bota was one of the most sordid sites of repression until the 1950s. In most cases, the only crime committed by those executed was having communed with republican ideas.