Walter Benjamin will have a memorial in Portbou to honor his fight against hate speech.
The project seeks to disseminate the thinker's work and his legacy.
PortbouThe Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government) will grant €4.43 million to the Portbou City Council (Alt Empordà) to rehabilitate the old town hall and the old schools and transform them into the Walter Benjamin memorial space. The agreement stipulates that the Department of Territory will assume the costs of the works and that the Department of Justice will then manage the facility through the consortium of the Exile Memorial Museum (MUME), based in La Jonquera. The Ministry of Culture has been responsible for drafting the project and will also actively participate in the subsequent phases. The aim of the memorial is to disseminate the work of Walter Benjamin and his legacy against hate speech.
This Saturday, an agreement was signed between the Departments of Territory and Justice and the Portbou City Council, sealing the authorities' commitment to the Walter Benjamin memorial. The objective of this space is to offer citizens a facility to disseminate the figure of the thinker and subsequently promote the study of his works and understand his legacy. Furthermore, it seeks to strengthen Walter Benjamin's connection with Portbou and the fight against hate speech.
The memorial will have a ground floor dedicated to the museum of Walter Benjamin's life and exiles. The first floor of the space will be a library with classrooms and conference rooms. On the second floor will be the Hostel of Memory, with rooms to accommodate students, intellectuals, and artists who have scholarships to study works focused on the philosopher. This floor will also house workspaces for the facility's management.
The memorial project had been on hold since 2010, when the executive project was drawn up, but it never materialized. In 2024, the Ministry of Culture granted a grant to Portbou City Council to update the document. Since then, support has been secured from the Generalitat (Catalan Government) to move forward, as it will pay for the works and also assume the cost of managing the space.
The Catalan Minister for Territory, Housing, and Ecological Transition, Sílvia Paneque, emphasized that the project "speaks to Catalonia's capacity for coexistence and respect among people, whether they come from the north or the south." Therefore, Paneque believes it is necessary to strengthen the bond with "freedom and democracy" that Walter Benjamin forged with Portbou, the town where he died in 1940 while fleeing Nazism.
The three-way agreement was formalized within the framework of the Walter Benjamin International Colloquium, which is being held these days in Portbou. The meeting is celebrating its eleventh edition and proposes a cross-disciplinary analysis of the current democratic crisis around the world and the rise of radical and authoritarian right-wing movements.
