Carles Baroan 85-year-old retired economist, has seen something that perhaps not many Barcelonans have seen: a cannon from Montjuïc Castle firing at a target in the sea. Imagining it is spectacular, but according to what he says, attending the rehearsal was not such a big deal.
At the age of 19, the young Baró decided to sign up as a volunteer to do military service in the castle, in the 7th Coast Artillery Regimentbetween 1957 and 1959. It was one of the last to fulfill their obligationYo. Among the anecdotes he recalls is that of target shooting in the Mediterranean: he had to transport a 25-kilogram projectile to the gun: “They were Vickers cannons that came from a ship & rdquor ;. At that time, shooting tests were carried out periodically from the castle: once a year. The passage of ships was paralyzed and a buoy was placed as a target in the sea.
Cracks in the castle
In the test in which he participated, two shots were fired. It was not a technologically advanced process. The mount of the cannon was not ideal, and the castle cracked with every shot. In addition, the cannons (“Although I only saw one work, I don’t know if the others could also fire”, precise) had a maximum range of 12 kilometers, remember, when at that time there were ships that already reached more than three times as far.
The fact is that the cannon fired the projectile and the then soldier remembers seeing it evolve at a speed quite far from the speed of light: “He didn’t hit the target. The first shot fell short & rdquor ;. The second attempt also failed.
military prison
It was one of the scenes of the Baró military service, which, being a volunteer, lasted 24 months: the ordinary one lasted 18 months. He is not the last soldier of Montjuïc Castle, because after him still others did their military service there, but there were not many. He must be the penultimate. In 1960 the Government ceded the facility to the city council and closed the military prison it housed.
“I was a volunteer because I lived nearby, in Plaza Espanya & rdquor ;, account at a table in the bar that overlooks the castle courtyard. That allowed him to avoid remote destinations and relatively quickly achieve an overnight pass. It didn’t take long for him to arrive at an acceptable schedule: at eight in the morning he had to be at the castle. He got on his motorcycle. She was free after lunch, and in the afternoons she helped his father, an athlete and trainer with the same name who made custom sports shoes, after verifying as a user that it was difficult to get the right ones for running.
Visit day
Before that, he spent a month of instruction during which he spent the night in the castle, on the first lower floor, together with a total of 70 volunteers. “We were just entering the castle & rdquor ;, she says. They made life outside, with the exception of the days when he had to guard the patio during visits to the prisoners. Four days a year were allowed: Good Friday, Corpus Christi, La Mercè and Christmas, and the coexistence of the incarcerated with their families lasted 12 hours.
The soldiers had to control the situation without weapons. They gave them a whistle to alert them if something happened, but the only relevant thing he remembers is that one day after the visit no prisoner appeared. “We found him sleeping in a room & rdquor ;.
The prisoners were no more than 35 years old, and among the visitors there were relatives and children. But some prostitute also came up and coitus were tolerated by covering some of the cells with a blanket with bars that allowed prisoners to see each other. This informal system was also used for marriages, which would be a face-to-face but with questionable privacy and more discreet than when a prostitute arrived: “I came to see an auction, to see who paid more to be with her & rdquor ;.
Baró recalls the dungeons in the rooms that surround the patio, the same one in which, in the central point, the equestrian statue of Franco was found, then moved to a warehouse and subsequently decapitated, without that head having appeared yet. There were, he says, a hundred prisoners, no more than 35 years old. “One was a brigade who was caught selling a cannon for scrap & rdquor ;. “No, I don’t remember there being showers & rdquor ;, he says. Neither for the prisoners nor for the soldiers.
the castle accounts
From the roof of the castle the view of the sea is splendid. There Baró observes the cannons that are below and explains how the parabola of the projectile had to be calculated to try to hit an enemy that in fact never threatened the city. As the retired economist and history confirm, the objective of the castle was not so much to monitor who arrived by sea but to control those who were on the other side, in the city, and bomb them sporadically. Up to three times Montjuïc served as a base to bombard the people of Barcelona: in 1842, 1843 and 1856.
As an economics student, Baró was in charge of keeping the accounts. Control payments. And when he neared the end of his military service, he had to train his replacement. He says that for a while he kept meeting with some classmates, but he hasn’t seen any of them for a long time.
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He spent most of his life there in what are now the Gardens of Joan Brossa. There was no mention of the castle’s past, much less its most illustrious prisoner, Lluís Companys, shot there. In the cells that are in the lower part, which Baró does not remember having seen on his way through the castle, common prisoners, or rather politicians, lodged despite themselves. That is to say, they were not soldiers: they were anarchists, syndicalists, revolutionaries. There they were imprisoned, or tortured, or executed, or all of the above. Some left graffiti that today attract the attention of visitors.
A guide explains in English the graffiti that can be seen on them to a group of tourists while Baró walks through the space guided by its director trying to recognize spaces where he lived his military service. It is not something that costs him, his daughter, who accompanies him, He explains that the doctors study his case because of how well his memory preserves. It is not something they can say in the castle: the military left without leaving much data and it is not possible to know when the cannon was last fired. That is, when, presumably, he missed his target again for the last time.