n 1904, the San Lázaro hospital in Barcelona moved out of the city and relocated to the old farmhouse of Can Masdeu, on the hill of Horta, at the foot of the Collserola mountain range. There, for decades, people from the Catalan provinces who had contracted leprosy and inherited their families’ poverty were kept in isolation. In the late 1950s, the Dirección General de Sanidad decided to close the provincial leper colonies and transfer all their residents to the sanatoriums at Trillo, in Guadalajara, and Fontilles, in the Marina Alta region of Alicante. It was not the first time that their living conditions in that old farmhouse on the Horta hillside had been called into question in the name of a ‘public health rationale’ that advocated their transfer to new hospital facilities. They always managed to resist, arguing that the place, as well as providing the necessary conditions of isolation and care, allowed them to “move freely through the establishment’s extensive orchards and gardens and across the plots of land granted to each patient for their comfort and recreation”. This crucial argument was of no use when they received the irrevocable order to pack their belongings and board the bus that would take them to Fontilles. They were escorted by Dr Jorge Monfort Barba, head of the “National Campaign against Infectious Skin Diseases” in Barcelona. In an interview published in La Vanguardia Española, he claimed that the reluctance to leave was due to a “sentimental attachment to the place” and that, in fact, “no one has put up any serious resistance”; to which the journalist Manuel del Arco Álvarez replied: “The poor have little resistance.”
On the morning of 7 January 1961, eight women and twelve men boarded the bus that was waiting for them at the gates of the Can Masdeu farmhouse. Their names were Consol, Rosa, Ana, Julia, Cinta, Agustina, Francisca, Cristina, Vicent, Agustí, Manuel, Agustín, Ramon, Domingo, Manuel, Juan, José, Ángel, Alejandro and José. They had arrived at the Can Masdeu farmhouse in the 1940s and 1950s, coming from l’Aldea de Tortosa, Ulldecona, Ampolla, Figueras, Ametlla de Mar, Vilanova i la Geltrú and Burriana; or from the working-class neighbourhoods and districts of Barcelona, to which they had migrated from their home villages in Almería, Jaén, Murcia or Albacete. Getting on that bus meant leaving behind their friends, families, partners and children; but, above all, it meant abandoning a place where, despite the isolation, they had managed to preserve a certain degree of freedom. As night fell on that Saturday in January, the bus set off along the winding road leading to the remote valley of Fontilles. They were arriving at a different and distant place to which they would inevitably have to adapt. What no one could anticipate was that this place would also have to adapt to what those people brought with them. For example, their radios.
One of the first demands made by the “Catalan colony of Fontilles” was the right to use their personal radios, something that had been banned at the sanatorium since the early 1940s. The twenty radios that the writer and journalist Antonio Pérez de Olaguer brought for them from Barcelona – on the first organised trip with family and friends – proved to be a great help. The example caught on, and permission to use personal radios soon extended to the more than three hundred residents who were living in the Fontilles sanatorium at the time. Through their accounts, we have learnt that those battery-powered radios were used to listen to music, bullfights and football matches, but also to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the other side of the wall, in a country where many, like them, were seeking free airwaves.
AUDIO (COMING SOON)
