Barcelona“Barça is like an adopted son, who came from abroad but is ours. We adopted him a century ago and we feel that he is more ours,” said Antoni Blanchart, president of the Penya Blaugrana de les Corts. 100 years ago, on December 8, 1921, Barça decided in an extraordinary assembly of members held at the Teatre Bosque (the current cinemas of the same name in Gràcia) to buy the lands of Can Rabiot and Can Guerra, in Les Corts, for raise a new stadium. The field on Industry Street had become too small and had to keep growing. A century ago, the Barça club arrived in Les Corts and has not moved.
“It’s very special for the people of Les Corts. The neighborhood has changed a lot, so has the club. But the bond is still very strong,” said Blanchart, as he showed an exhibition organized by the club at the district’s headquarters. Corts, which explains the most important events in the history of the club, accompanied by the evolution of a neighborhood that bears no resemblance to that received by Barça. “When Barça came here, there was still a lot of agricultural land. And it was full of factories. In fact, there was a strong anarchist movement here,” explains Blanchart. It is now a residential neighborhood. The few factories that have survived are now civic centers, such as the Cristalerías Planell Civic Center, where in the 1920s the so-called children’s strike, as 9-year-olds worked there. One of them, Francesc Pedra, was one of the leaders of the revolt at the age of 11 and at 15 he became the union delegate for the glass sector in the CNT. Barça arrived in a neighborhood with an anarchist tradition, which kept changing. Like the club. To buy that farm known as the land of Can Guerra, Joan Gamper signed in February 1922 the contracts for an operation in which Barça paid the owner, Mercè Deu i Majó, a total of 928,500 pesetas by issuing debt bonds. bought by members who already faithfully followed the club. Barça was already a mass phenomenon born in the Gothic Quarter that had grown up in the Eixample and would take root in a neighborhood that until a few years before was an independent town.
Les Corts de Sarrià was one of the municipalities that had been born on the plain of Barcelona at the beginning of the 19th century. Most of these municipalities were born coinciding with the parishes, except in the case of Les Corts, which always shared the parish with Sarrià, from which it became independent in 1836. Sarrià remained the mountain part, and les Corts, the part of the plain. And it was an independent nucleus until it was annexed to Barcelona in 1897, against the will of its inhabitants. “Even today those of us who have been in the Cortes all our lives say that we go abroad when we go to Sarrià, for example,” says Blanchart jokingly. United for decades, Sarrià and Les Corts ended up separated. Partly for football, since in 1923 Espanyol set up its field in Sarrià. “Before Les Corts was full of football fields, not only Barça’s. When we were little, they used to take us to play in the Font de l’Ocellet fields, which is now Pedralbes. We also had the pitch in the neighborhood. del Remei, on the corner of Numancia and Diagonal, or another where Diagonal Island now stands. There are none left, “he recalls.
“A potato camp”
The first stone of the old field of Les Corts was laid on February 19, 1922. “That day we all stepped on potatoes, as it was a field of potatoes ready for harvest,” recalls Joan Gamper’s son. Authorities and executives signed a parchment that, inside a sealed glass tube, was to be placed inside the stone, but the club secretary forgot the tube in his pocket. But oblivion was not discovered until later, when the tube appeared in the offices. On the day of the first stone, more than 2,500 people marched in procession to the grounds, where several politicians, Joan Gamper and also Josep Samitier, spoke on behalf of the players. On May 20, 1922, the stadium opened with Barça defeating the Scottish Saint Mirren 2-1, with visiting defender Bob Birrell scoring the first goal of the new venue. The Barça goalkeeper was still Ricardo Zamora, who was already negotiating to return to Espanyol. It was the first game of a legendary stadium, home to Barça for 35 years. The land occupied the space that today delimits the streets of Numancia and Marquès de Sentmenat and the Travessera de les Corts. The playing field was 101 meters long and 62 meters wide and was the work of architects Santiago Mestres and Josep Alemany. The capacity of the field of the Cortes evolved from the initial 25,000 spectators of that first party to the 60,000 of the last years, when the legend says that with the arrival of Kubala it remained small.
But what was it like going to the old field of Les Corts? “There was football all day. Barça fans played, the branch …, under a grandstand, the basketball team played, wearing white pants. My father said that was not a sport, with boys. in underwear, and on match days, there was always a cider house, there was always a commotion in the courts, because people didn’t agree on whether to watch the game standing or sitting. a hot Cacaolat at the Siete Hermanos, a bar next door. the pine of the Cortes. “It was where people were before and after games. Where people were arguing about the players when things weren’t going well. this pine tree was planted in 1836, on the Travessera de les Corts between Vallespir and Numancia. And it is still in place, cataloged and declared a space of local interest. “A plaque should be put up to remind people going to the camp,” says Blanchart, who is leading a campaign to ask City Hall to put up a plaque next to the pine tree. In fact, to remember the stadium of Les Corts, there is only an old plaque on the façade of a bar, very hidden.
With the transfer of Barça to the Camp Nou in 1957, the old camp was losing value, although the subsidiary would play for a few more years. Finally, the board decided to make a profit by selling the land and demolishing the stadium in 1966, when the Camp Nou had been singing goals for years. “My father gave cigars to the workers at the Camp Nou so we could go into the works and see how the new stadium grew. Blanchart explains. The club had been left with empty pockets and president Enric Llaudet sold the old stadium to businessman Josep Maria Figueras for 226 million. Many partners took stones from the old field, others bought a flat in the buildings erected on the site where they had been so happy. All that remains of the old stadium is a monument to Alfredo Sánchez, erected in 2007 to celebrate a gathering of Barça supporters clubs in L’Hospitalet. The artist used the remains of the wooden beams of the field to make it, taking advantage of the fact that a friend, Josep Maria Bassols, kept them after his father rescued them from the ruins in 1966. The sculpture is now in the Ocaña sisters’ square, in the Collblanc district of L’Hospitalet.
Far from the old field, Barça continued to grow at the Camp Nou, always in Les Corts, where it now plans to remodel the whole area with the Espai Barça project. A project that divides the residents of the neighborhood, always fond of debates. “This neighborhood breathes Barcelonanism. We have Joan Gamper Street, where we have the supporters club. When he got married, his father told him that before the ceremony he had to go to see Barça, who were playing at five o’clock “, adds the president of the supporters club, based in Gamper street. Naturally, the street dedicated to the club’s founder is in Les Corts, the neighborhood that Barça adopted.
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