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Francesc Català-Roca’s shot of sailors in 1950s Barcelona captures a bankrupt regime courting the spoils of tourism
In 1951, General Franco’s regime in Spain, bankrupted by two wars, did a deal that allowed the sixth fleet of the US navy and some Royal Navy ships to dock in Barcelona. The sailors found the Catalan capital, centre of resistance to Franco and fascism, on its knees. The city’s economy was partly saved by the arrival of sailors, who brought not only dollars but jazz and rock’n’roll and a postwar lightness to the Ramblas. A recent book, The Sixth Fleet in Barcelona, by the Spanish journalist Xavier Theros, itemises this impact. Bars, tailors, souvenir shops – and the sex industry – boomed. Barcelona was reinvented as a tourist destination.
This photograph of sailors in Barrio Chino in 1953 was taken by the pioneering documentary photographer Francesc Català-Roca, who died in 1998, and whose centenary is celebrated this summer at the festival PhotoEspaña in Madrid. Català-Roca was the son of a Republican photographer, Pere Català-Pic, famous for an image of a peasant’s shoe stepping on a swastika. The younger man made two landmark studies of postwar Barcelona and Madrid, though his work received little recognition during the repressive Franco years.
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