Plaça de Sant Felip Neri

Historic · Barri Gotic (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

A small Barcelona square whose church front is still pitted by the bombs that killed forty-two people sheltering here in 1938.

Plaça de Sant Felip Neri is a small paved square with a fountain and a plane tree, and the front of its baroque church is pitted from the ground to well above head height. On the morning of 30 January 1938 the Italian air force bombed Barcelona for over two hours. A bomb fell into this square while children were sheltering in the church basement, and a second came down minutes later into the people who had run in to dig them out. Forty-two died here, about twenty of them children. The church was rebuilt and the scars were deliberately left. For decades an official explanation circulated that the marks were bullet holes from an execution of priests at the start of the war, and that version stayed in print long enough to become the square's folklore. It is not what happened: the holes are shrapnel, and a lectern in the square now says so plainly. The square is otherwise ordinary, with a primary school along one side.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Before nine in the morning is the only quiet hour — a school occupies one side of the square, and from mid-morning the noise of a playground fills it completely.
It is behind the cathedral and hidden on purpose — three narrow lanes lead in and none of them shows you the square until you are in it, which is exactly why it was used as a shelter.
Read the lectern before photographing the wall — the square is a memorial with a school in it, and the story on the panel is the reason the damage was never repaired.

Things to do

1
Read the whole front at once
Take the middle of the square, face the church and stay still for a minute. The fountain is the only sound before the school breaks. Then look at the whole front at once rather than at individual holes, and the pattern of the blast becomes visible: denser low and to one side, thinning as it goes up.
2
Spot the two facades that moved house
Look around the square for the two facades that do not sit quite right, with carved trade emblems above their doors. They came from streets destroyed elsewhere and were put back together here. Compare their stonework with the church beside them: different colour, different cut, different century.