Somorrostro shanty town
A huge area of shacks stretched from Barceloneta to the Besos River. These formed shanty villages, the most famous of which was Somorrostro. Most were pulled down between the 1960s and 1980s, though a small area of informal housing survived until the Forum’s construction in the early 2000s.
Los Tarantos, an essential film in the history of flamenco, was filmed here in the 1963. The love between two gipsies, Juana La Zoronga and Rafael El Taranto, from different families in Barcelona is thwarted by the enmity between their respective parents… Wikipedia
Links
- Barraques.cat (Brilliant exhibition) Shantyism, an urban phenomenon of the first magnitude in Barcelona extending from the beginning of the 20th century to almost the time of the 1992 Summer Olympics, created a veritable “informal city” beside the old urban nuclei, the Eixample district and the various forms of growth of the urban periphery.
- Barraques (superb documentary about Barcelona’s shany towns) At the beginning of the sixties, about a hundred thousand people lived in shacks in Barcelona. They had arrived from many areas of Spain, avoiding the misery and the post-war political persecution. In Barcelona, they did not find another place to live than caves and fragile houses which were improvised with the materials that they found. The shantytowns kept growing. There were El Somorrostro and El Camp de la Bota on the beaches, and the multiple shantytowns of Montjuïc or El Carmel on the hills.
