LMT #147: The Casas Baratas, Barcelona, Spain – José Luis Oyón

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José Luis Oyón
Professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain)

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Click here for the Spanish version

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As the sole municipal intervention in working-class housing, the Casas Baratas of the Patronato Municipal de la Habitación were designed to rehouse the shantytown dwellers of Montjuïc, the site of the 1929 International Exposition. However, the rapid construction of 2,335 housing units across four extremely peripheral developments constituted more of a problem than a genuine solution. Families were evicted by the Civil Guard barely a week before the event’s opening. Rents turned out to be far from cheap, and the new neighborhoods failed to meet adequate urban planning conditions, suffering from extreme remoteness and a lack of access to the city center.

The Casas Baratas had a homogeneously working-class character. In both the Milans del Bosch and Eduardo Aunós developments, unskilled workers accounted for over 80% of heads of household. Proletarian ghettos, they were also ghettos of recently arrived immigrant populations. Regional groups from the latest wave of immigration, such as Murcians and Andalusians, clearly outnumbered the local Catalan population. Highly prominent was the presence of households shared by two or more family units, whether tied by direct kinship or without any apparent relationship. This led to an extremely high level of overcrowding: 6.7 people per dwelling.

Lacking tram or bus lines, the commutes to work for the inhabitants of the Casas Baratas were on foot and generally costly in both time and money: bedroom communities where working-class people returned home at late hours. Waiting for them there was a neighborhood with virtually no leisure venues. Networks of relatives and fellow townspeople, alongside street life, compensated for this lack of meeting places. Among Barcelona’s working-class neighborhoods, the Eduardo Aunós development stood out for the presence of close first-degree relatives sometimes living within the same home, other times just around the corner (nearly 60% had a direct relative living in the neighborhood). These relationships, channeled mainly by women, could extend to less immediate relatives, cousins, or simply fellow countrymen from the same village or county. The vast majority of the Andalusian population residing in the Eduardo Aunós development hailed from Cuevas de Vera, in the province of Almería.

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The street was the primary stage where this entire web of networks of relatives, fellow townspeople, neighbors, and friends unfolded. A “horizontal city” where the street was the quintessential space for social interaction.

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The small size of the homes (38 m² for the most part), the high household occupancy rate, the large number of children, and the physical immediacy and lack of boundaries between the single-story cottages and the street made the domestic space literally burst outward, converting the street into the main sphere of community cohesion. Even domestic chores, such as fetching water from the public fountain or drying clothes in the sun, were carried out in the street.

The employment structure of recent, low-skilled immigration brought severe consequences during the crisis of the 1930s in sectors such as construction, which held a majority of immigrant laborers. The impact of unemployment in construction translated literally into hunger, disease, and conflict. As in other peripheral neighborhoods, low skill levels and immigration were clearly associated with cenetismo (allegiance to the CNT). The Casas Baratas were a prominent setting for the expansion of the CNT during the 1930s, the radicalized majority anarchist union. With 64% of all construction workers in its ranks, the combative Sindicato Único de la Construcción was a permanent source of unrest, mobilization capacity, and radicalism. In the Casas Baratas of the Sant Andreu area, union membership was overwhelmingly skewed toward unskilled laborers, who accounted for 93% of all cenetistas. That membership rate was double that of the area’s other secondary peripheries and quadruple that of the historical core, a trend also observed when analyzing the Metalworkers’ Union, which showed a marked concentration in certain peripheral areas. In the Ramón Albó Casas Baratas in late 1938, the CNT held absolute dominance over day laborers, nine out of ten of whom had been born outside Catalonia. The CNT’s Sindicato Único de Transportes had the highest membership there: more than half were tram workers employed by the then-collectivized Tranvías de Barcelona.

The analysis of confederal militancy paints the same picture. A substantial portion of the militants resided in the new neighborhoods that formed the secondary peripheries; in neighborhoods such as La Torrassa and Santa Eulalia in L’Hospitalet, in the two Casas Baratas developments, or in the new working-class neighborhoods that emerged during the interwar years in Santa Coloma, Sant Adrià, or Badalona. Fully 86% of the 300 confederal militants identified in Santa Coloma came from the peripheral neighborhoods established during the interwar period. The presence of persistent abstentionism across the various Republican elections was, in confederal circles, synonymous with radical activism: the four Casas Baratas developments ranked among the most abstentionist neighborhoods in the city. At least three of the four neighborhoods had branches of the Juventudes Libertarias (Libertarian Youth). The branch in the Ramón Albó development was located at the neighborhood’s Construction Union headquarters, while the one in the Milans del Bosch development operated out of premises that opened in the adjacent Sanchís neighborhood in late 1932.

The development of the rent strike across the four Casas Baratas developments shows that the CNT found its most loyal and radicalized base of support there. Even before the Economic Defense Commission of the Construction Union launched the major rent strike of the summer of ’31, direct action in the form of rent withholding had already erupted across all four developments. In April 1930, the Patronato obtained an eviction order for 60 families from the Eduardo Aunós and Milans del Bosch developments. By February 1931, it is likely that over half of the homes in the former development were in default, and by early May, the residents agreed to suspend rent payments entirely. In June, as the Economic Defense Commission was about to initiate the strike, coordination among the four Casas Baratas developments was already in place, and most tenants had gone nearly four months without paying rent. As Rider notes, “the tenant movement of the Casas Baratas immediately and inevitably became an integral part of the CNT, and of the Construction Union in particular.” On the night of October 31, the Aunós development was raided by Civil and Assault Guards, and every house was searched. On November 23, an agreement was reached with the Patronato to pay 20 pesetas a month plus a 12-peseta fee for electricity and water, alongside a suspension of eviction proceedings, rent exemptions for the unemployed, and renovation work, on the condition that the most radical activists be excluded. The initial agreement broke down, and the strike once again became general across all four developments. It held firm in the four Casas Baratas developments and appears to have persisted, more or less intermittently, until the Civil War.

During 1936, no fewer than 41 neighborhood libertarian atheneums operated in Barcelona. In the spatial distribution of the network of atheneums and rationalist schools their presence is significant in the secondary peripheries, among them the Casas Baratas. A list of all revolutionary neighborhood committees compiled from the newspapers Solidaridad Obrera and Tierra y Libertad at the end of 1936 also highlights the prominent presence of peripheral neighborhoods as a whole. The four Casas Baratas developments all had a revolutionary committee (or subcommittee). Reports regarding the confederal militias linked to these committees are at times explicit, not only concerning the supply of food and warm clothing to volunteers, as well as the holding of raffles, festivals, and fundraising events, but also regarding the departure of militiamen to the front lines. On September 11, a lengthy article recalled the departure of the “Sacco y Vanzetti” battery from the Casas Baratas of Horta and its journey, amid an atmosphere of enthusiasm, to the Sagrera station.

When studying the urban distribution of volunteer anarchist militiamen who set off for the front following the triumphant days of July ’36, the particular importance of the peripheral working-class belt in the geography of CNT radicalism becomes strikingly clear. The neighborhoods with the highest relative contribution of anarchist militiamen, the bastions of confederal radicalism, were indisputably situated on the periphery. In the front rank stood the Casas Baratas. In that belt, the number of militiamen was at least triple what would be expected based on its population.

This peripheral geography and the laborer and immigrant profile of the radical CNT world are ultimately confirmed when analyzing the anarchist casualties and detainees subjected to reprisal in the wake of the Fets de Maig (May Events). The outermost neighborhoods continued to stand out as major hotbeds of targeted radicals. Nearly 30% of all prisoners hailed from these neighborhoods, with the Eduardo Aunós Casas Baratas standing out in particular. Pere López has studied the atmosphere of radical cenetismo in that neighborhood. They would be harshly tried in courts-martial once the defeat was finalized. A number of young anarcho-syndicalists suffered severe reprisals, and some were even sentenced to death. Others went into exile in France upon the entry of fascist troops in January 1939. By the end of 1940, residential mobility out of the neighborhood among quite a few families was already remarkable, and they no longer appeared on the census.

The legacy of struggle and participation of the 1930s, along with its leading role in activities related to the war and the revolution, gradually faded into oblivion. Three of the four Casas Baratas developments have vanished. Today, only the Ramón Albó development (Can Peguera) remains standing and inhabited. After a prolonged period in which the working-class and anarchist memory of these neighborhoods was forgotten, two blocks of houses in the Milans del Bosch development (Bon Pastor) were restored by the Museu d’Història de Barcelona (MUHBA) as a conference room and permanent exhibition on the evolution of working-class housing in the city since 1859. A highly impressive museum transformation of four housing units meticulously details, through exceptionally rich documentation, the different periods in the evolution of domestic interiors.

General plan of the project for the four Casas Baratas developments, 1929 (source: Arxiu Patronat Municipal de l’Habitatge)

Tradução: Vinicius Rosalvo

López Sánchez, Pere, Rastros de rostros en un prado rojo (y negro). Las Casas Baratas de Can Tunis en la revolución social de los años treinta, Barcelona: Virus, 2013.

Stefano Portelli, La ciudad horizontal, Urbanismo y resistencia en un barrio de Casas Baratas de Barcelona, Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2015.

Oyón, José Luis, La quiebra de la ciudad popular. Espacio urbano, inmigración y anarquismo en la Barcelona de entreguerras, 1914-1936, Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 2008.

Gallardo Romero, Juan José, Los orígenes del movimiento obrero en Santa Coloma de Gramenet (1923-1936), Barcelona: Grupo de Historia “José Berruezo”, 2004.

Rider, Nick, La práctica de la acción directa: la huelga de alquileres de Barcelona de 1931, 1989 https://libertamen.wordpress.com/2025/04/20/

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Cover image credit: Aerial photograph of the Baró de Viver Casas Baratas development (photograph by Josep Gaspar Serra, Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona)

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