In 2011, metro line 9 reached Mirasierra, in the Fuencarral-El Pardo district. Although it had been a neighborhood that had been more than consolidated for decades, the suburban line had slowed down at Herrera Oria, on the other side of Carretera de la Playa, and rumors had it that some residents of the exclusive neighborhood neighborhoods preferred that the transport of the working class par excellence reached, better, only at the gates of their estates. Truth or lie, the popular version spoke of a residential, middle-class urban island, with beautiful cottages, tree-lined streets and plenty of private security. A neighborhood which, few people know, was designed in the post-war period under the auspices of social housing and built by the hands of ordinary and political prisoners.
Let’s start with context. Convict labor was common in the 19th century and, more recently, in the North African colonies. One of the best known uses of slave labor to carry out public works in our country is the Isabel II canal in Madrid. This practice was eradicated from the legal corpus under the Second Republic, although during the war there were work camps on both sides.
Reborn in the post-war period as a form of punishment for losers and a key element in the reconstruction of the country, the most well-known use of this type of bonded labor was the works of the Valley of the Fallen in Cuelgamuros (we have already found the surname Banús there, which we will repeat a lot in this article). But this practice was very widespread and took the form of what we call penitentiary detachments. These began their journey as soon as the war ended, reaching their peak in 1944 when there were 121 such establishments, which housed a population of around 16,000 prisoners working for the state and corporations private.
From this date, common law prisoners also began to arrive in the detachments. To ensure that the private companies that employed the prisoners did not engage in unfair competition with others, the daily wage was set at the minimum for the work, although in practice it was usually lower. Additionally, authorities and businesses soon realized that convict workers were more productive than free workers because their workdays were extended as much as necessary. This is what the General Directorate of Prisons itself expresses in one of its reports:
The objective was “national reconstruction and greatness”… by carrying out… “those public works which are not profitable at the cost of ordinary wages, which cannot be undertaken with free labor and with which enormous riches can be enlightened for future prosperity.” from Spain »
The Mirasierra penal detachment began operating in 1954. The normal thing at that time was that the regime employed prisoners in the construction of railways or reservoirs, but the nature of this would be very different: the construction of the colony satellite of Mirasierra, an urbanization of small hotels built on the rustic land then known as Valdelobos.
José Banús, one of the two brothers belonging to the line of builders who made their fortune under the first Franco regime – and who had already previously benefited from the work of anti-Franco convicts – thought thus: “Providence has reserved this place intended to be used by the suffering middle class and, within it, by the less well off. It is collected by the historian Fernando Colmenarejo in his work Living in Madrid without suffering from it, living in Mirasierra (Fuencarral, Madrid). The last penal detachment in Spain. We owe much of the information contained in this article to him.
The project was led by his brother Juan, who began to acquire these rural lands at the beginning of the forties, but he initially encountered the distrust of the owners and the contrary position of the Fuencarral town hall, which land belonged to. The regime came to the rescue with the decree-law of November 19, 1948 which, under the pretext of resolving the terrible housing crisis that Spain was going through, opened the doors to private initiative and facilitated the means of forced expropriation. This will not be the last time that administrative decisions of the regime will favor the interests of Hermanos Banús SA. Years later, a timely reclassification would exponentially increase the prices of the land they had acquired in the place where they were going to build the El Pilar neighborhood (in this case, José Banús would be the main developer).
This is how, under the pretext of combating the housing shortage and the “workers’ strike”, the construction company Jubán SA was created, which proposed to the National Unemployment Council a project for the construction of 2,000 small subsidized hotels, which would be carried in tranches of 200 hotels, the property company reserving the possibility of selling them.
Once the required authorization was obtained in 1953, it was time to knock on another door in the Francoist framework: that of the Patronage for the Redemption of Sentences through Work, created in 1937. Only a year later, the Mirasierra Penal Detachment was inaugurated, which was born with the aim of providing labor for the construction of the colony and which would employ 150 prisoners. According to data provided by Colmenarejo, in the sixties more than half of the workers who worked on the construction of Mirasierra were punished (56.63%).
Those who know the area should locate their now-defunct figure on Travesía de la Costa Brava, next to the Santa Joaquina de Vedruna school and the M-607 (Colmenar road). On the banks of Fuencarral and looking across the road to Mirasierra.
But at the height of the sixties, with only a small part of the neighborhood built and expropriations unpaid, it was clear that the social component of the enterprise had led to luxury urbanization. A walk through the BOE brings back some lawsuits filed by the first owners of the land in Fuencarral against Jubosa and expropriations by emergency measures, sometimes correcting the fair price upwards.
As the issue was controversial, the Council of State ruled in May 1965 against the cancellation of benefits granted years ago by the National Unemployment Council, while urging the company to speed up construction.
The prison detachments died out in 1970, but the Mirasierra Correctional Center continued its life for another decade. In September 1981, the press announced the end of the prison, which was then an open prison. The official communication indicates that he had simply fulfilled his mission with the construction company and that in fact, Comercial Mirasierra SA took charge of the facilities when the last prisoners left.
At that time, only a dozen prisoners lived in Mirasierra House, who were primarily dedicated to maintaining the facility itself. A few years before, being an open prison, it had had an illustrious inhabitant – who would be even more so a few years later. It was about Jesús Gil y Gil, who passed by after the unfortunate collapse of Los Angeles de San Rafael which cost the lives of 58 people. Gil y Gil ends up there after passing through other prisons and becomes the head of the office. The builder had freedom of movement, he went to his office on Goya Street every day and Mirasierra went back to sleep. On February 24, 1972, Franco granted him a pardon, after 27 months in prison.
In the current city of Madrid there were other prison detachments, such as those of Fuencarral (linked to Construcciones AMSA) or Chamartín (also in Hermanos Banús), whose inmates were used in the construction of the Burgos railway line -Madrid. There were others in the area, such as Bustarviejo, whose prisoners were also employed on this route. The agricultural use given to its barracks after its closure in the 1950s allowed its survival and archaeologists and historians have been able to learn more about the lives of prisoners, discovering, for example, that it was common for people to gather near prisons. They set up shanty towns where some of the prisoners’ families lived to be close to them.
The penal detachment that existed at the gates of Mirasierra was one of the most populous and oldest of the Franco regime, although its existence is practically unknown to the majority of Madrid residents. The hands of the prisoners of the dictatorship built these small stone hotels, with beautiful weather vanes on the roofs, and almost no one knows about it today.
