Parc de Ciutadella, a contested place of conflict and memory in Barcelona

Abstract

This study examines the process of remembering and unremembering around the physical monumentality associated with historic military control over the city of Barcelona and its surrounding region. In particular, it looks at the Parc de Ciutadella, Barcelona’s primary public park and green space, where a major fortification was built in the eighteenth century to pacify and control the city, following the siege of Barcelona in 1714 and the subsequent oppression of the Catalan region by the Bourbons. Deliberately destroyed in the nineteenth century, it was perceived at that time as a hated symbol of repression, a perception that has continued in the literature and through various interpretative schemes in the city’s heritage centres and museums. Memory around the site is contested and selective and has been deployed in the officially constructed narratives of separatism.