The hostile concrete skeleton that is today the former thermal power station of Las Tres Chimeneas shelters an ecosystem. Earth, bushes and stones collected from the surrounding area coexist in a small greenhouse with a musty smell that the artist Ugo Schiavi installed in the building of the European cultural biennial Manifesta, which is being held until November 24 in various spaces of the metropolitan area of Barcelona.
work, Autotrophic spectraworks as an analogy for what Sant Adrià is: a town that resists more than 100 years of industrial activity, whose greatest symbol are the three enormous towers 200 meters high that have left contaminated soil, a beach inaccessible and, above all, a polluting legacy maintained with a waste incinerator, a combined cycle factory and a crematorium.
“We know we’re coming home when we see the Three Chimneys on the horizon,” said one of the neighbors, visiting for the first time the twenty works installed in the infrastructure open to the public, the most visited the Festival. Manifest.
The imposing chimneys, active from 1975 to 2011, are an emblem of the Catalan coast. Just like Paris has the Eiffel Tower or Barcelona has the Sagrada Familia, Sant Adrià has the Three Chimneys. A watchtower that monitors the city and is visible from any point in the city. The residents feel they belong, as evidenced by their decision to keep them standing during a popular consultation in 2008. But the carbon legacy they left behind is inevitable.
“It’s an ambivalent memory. At the beginning, we looked at them with great concern about the pollution they emitted, but also valuing the jobs they offered. With its declaration as a Cultural Asset of Local Interest, we have succeeded in ensuring that it is valued not only as a sign of the identity of our city, but also as a vestige of industrial heritage which reminds us of what our past was. past and where we come from”, Roger tells this media Hoyos, president of the Platform for the Conservation of the Three Chimneys.
Trapped in an industrial zone
Sant Adrià was an agricultural commune until the end of the 19th century, but at the beginning of the 20th century, favored by the railway, the abundance of water and cheap land, textile, electrical, chemical and metallurgical industries began to take root. The first thermal power station in Sant Adrià began operating in 1913, on the same site now occupied by the Colossal Chimneys, the largest building in the Mediterranean.
At peak demand times in the 1970s, the industry provided 40% of Catalonia’s electricity demand, which is why it was nicknamed the community’s “light factory.” “When we were children we played in the clouds of pollution and black spots that formed at Camp de la Bota. Now I wonder what will happen to these children’s bodies. We were stuck in the 70s, 80s and 90s in architectural barriers, in the middle of an industrial zone, in pollution. We don’t know the consequences this will have on our lives,” says Paqui Perona, a resident of the La Mina neighborhood, one of those that make up the city.
Perona appears in one of the three videos that Manifesta has placed on the second floor of Las Tres Chimeneas. The space, the most frequented by visitors, is dedicated to telling, through photographs, archives and documentaries, the history of the city. Other protagonists of the films tell how, after a night of intense activity in the fireplace, hanging clothes would appear yellow stained or with holes, and parked cars would appear with burnt paint. Sant Adrià was declared a contaminated atmospheric zone in 1983. The exhibition does not forget the union unrest that provoked the factory movement: during the civil war the factory became a military objective and was bombed in 1938, causing 16 victims.
“We don’t want him to be remembered only as a monster that spewed smoke and noise, which he was, but not only that,” says Ginés Romero, an employee of Las Tres Chimeneas for 36 years. and member of the Sant Joan association. Association of the Baptista neighborhood, the neighborhood closest to the factory.
All the renewed attention to the old factory serves to reveal the ongoing problems of a toxic legacy. Visible in the fourth year of closure of the city beach due to pollution, in the black earth with carcinogenic elements which rose to the surface during the work of the Rambleta, and in the insistence of the Generalitat to make it a area of constant industrial activity.
Endless factories
In La Catalana, a neighborhood born at the beginning of the last century with self-built one-story houses with gardens, the Tersa waste incinerator, the Endesa and Naturgy combined cycle power plants and a crematorium are concentrated.
“The residents of Sant Adrià want to know why factories of this type are not located in other places that are not surrounded by people. If you look in the European Union, there are waste treatment plants that are totally far from urban centers and surrounded by forests,” laments José Caparrós, president of the Association of Neighborhoods of La Catalana, an area that has began its modernization in 2003. becoming the place with the most green spaces and residences in the city.
“The one that benefits the most is Barcelona and its metropolitan area. All the dirt comes here, we are the garden of Barcelona”, continues Caparrós. The Sant Adrià City Council has requested the dismantling of Tersa, the biggest problem currently for the neighbors. The environmental prosecutor’s office has denounced the excessive contamination of the factory , but the judge closed the case considering that the legal limits had not been exceeded.
The pollution shadow of the Three Chimneys is long, but those who see it daily believe that is why it should be a center for learning about pollution and interpreting the industrial past. Indeed, its future is subject to controversy. The latest Urban Plan provides for the creation of a district comprising nearly 2,000 housing units, hotels, offices and businesses. A project rejected by neighbors, who demand that the neighborhood be a green lung.
A contested future
“It’s the mouth of a river with a lot of potential for ecological diversity. Furthermore, the area is prone to flooding and everything indicates that episodes of torrential rain will be more and more frequent, as will maritime storms. The recovery for citizens of a coastline kidnapped by industry for more than 100 years is also a compelling reason. Ultimately, a park is the most resilient solution,” says Hoyos.
A resilience with which the artistic pieces installed by the Manifesta were able to dialogue: Frankenstein’s treean artificial forest constructed from broken tree branches and other remains, is Kia Henda’s reflection on the power of nature to heal itself, even after climate disasters and wars. Or Ojo Estudio’s sustainable proposal for the functional spaces of the head office.
What is clear is that Adrianenses want a building that returns to its original purpose of serving the community. Romero, a former factory worker, comments: “Here, we didn’t make cars, we made light. It was a public service and we want it to continue to be so. If the private sector takes precedence over the public, it will be a catastrophe. “We want this to be a space for everyone.”
