100,000 poems fall from the sky over Barcelona, transforming Civil War bombings into a mass reading
On Saturday evening, a helicopter dropped 100,000 bookmarks bearing freedom poems over Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, turning a symbol of past air raids into a collective act of reading and memory.
From bombs to bookmarks
On Saturday at 20:30, a helicopter flew over Barcelona's Gothic Quarter and released 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems about freedom. The action, called Bombardeo de Poemas, transforms the memory of aerial bombardments during the Spanish Civil War into a poetic event. Instead of explosives, the crowd reached for flying bookmarks, creating a mass reading. The helicopter departed from Sabadell and made two trips, carrying half a ton of printed material.
A city scarred by war
Between 1937 and 1939, Barcelona suffered 1,903 impacts and over a million kilos of bombs, killing more than 2,700 people. The Italian fascist aviation used the city as a testing ground for civilian destruction. On 30 January 1938, a bombing at Sant Felip Neri square killed 42 people, including 20 children from a nearby orphanage. The same square now hosts a school, and on Saturday it once again became the site of an aerial drop, this time peaceful.
It was beautiful.
Casagrande's global mission
The Chilean art collective Casagrande conceived the first Bombardeo de Poemas in 2001 over Santiago's La Moneda palace, rethinking the space of the military coup. Since then, they have replicated the action in nine other bombed cities worldwide: Dubrovnik (2002), Guernica (2004), Warsaw (2009), Berlin (2010), London (2012), Milan (2015), Madrid (2018) and Rotterdam.
After the dictatorship in our country, it was above all an idea of rethinking the place and resignifying that space.
- Santiago de Chile – first poetry bombing over La Moneda palace
- Dubrovnik – second intervention
- Guernica – site of the 1937 Nazi bombing
- Warsaw – commemorating World War II destruction
- Berlin – poetry over the German capital
- London – poems over the Blitz-scarred city
- Milan – Italian city that also suffered wartime bombing
- Madrid – the Spanish capital receives the poetic drop
- Barcelona – 100,000 freedom poems fall over the Gothic Quarter
A collective reading under the helicopter
The crowd, many locals who usually avoid the tourist-heavy Cathedral area, cheered as the poems fell. Antònia watched her grandson try to knock a stuck bookmark from a tree branch with balls. The poems, selected from 100 Catalan and Chilean poets with gender parity and an emphasis on writers under 50, were printed in both Spanish and Catalan. Attendees exchanged bookmarks, turning a square into a giant reading room.
Fifty years since Franco
The action was part of "España en libertad. 50 años", a program marking five decades since the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. By dropping poems over the same skies that once rained bombs, the event reclaims the urban airspace for culture, memory and the word "libertad."
