Spanish Civil War Free Walking Tour

In July 1936, Barcelona's workers and anarchist unions beat back a military coup in the streets — and for months afterward, the anarchist CNT-FAI collectivized factories, trams and even hotels across the city. Starting at Plaça de Catalunya, this tour points out the square's own Hotel Colón, wrapped for years in a giant PSUC hammer-and-sickle mural and one of the war's most photographed buildings, and reconstructs the atmosphere a young George Orwell walked into when he arrived that December, later described in Homage to Catalonia.

The story darkens fast: street fighting between rival left-wing factions in 1937, Italian bombers pounding the city from the air in 1938, and residents digging hundreds of shelters into the bedrock to survive it. Barcelona fell to Franco's troops in January 1939 — your guide walks you through exactly how, and what it cost.