Update: On Tuesday morning, January 28, 2025, the Mossos d’Esquadra together with the Guardia Urbana have initiated a surprise and unannounced eviction of the space.
Hidden behind the bustle of the Boqueria Market, in the heart of the Raval, is a building that has been watching the city for half a lifetime, and that has gone from being the main medieval hospital of Barcelona to its most iconic art school and, now, to a vibrant squatted social center that lives pending eviction. We’re talking about the Antigua Massana, a space we’ve snuck into to find out what’s going on inside.
Originally built in the 15th century , the Hospital de la Santa Creu served as the city’s main hospital until the 1920s, when it was moved to the current Hospital de Sant Pau.
After that, the building housed for decades the prestigious Massana School, a benchmark in Barcelona’s artistic training for more than eighty years .
But at the beginning of the 21st century, the iconic school moved to its new location, a contemporary building right across the street from the previous one. After that , in 2016, the old Massana building was abandoned, facing an uncertain future.
From social oasis to the risk of eviction.
After a few years of abandonment, on the night of Sant Joan in 2020, the year of the pandemic, various social collectives in the Raval (El Sindicat de Habitatge, la Xarxa Popular d’Aliments…) squatted the space to transform it into a food distribution center for people at risk during the pandemic. The importance of this distribution point was such that the Antiga Massana collective explains that the social services referred families to La Massana to provide them with food.
After the pandemic, and over time, the space has become a small social oasis in the Raval ( and the largest squatted social center in Barcelona), where about twenty collectives offer all kinds of activities. From a popular martial arts gym to art and screen printing workshops for young people to a little school for families to bring their children in the afternoons and weekends. In addition, the space is a space for all these entities, which have a place to meet here.
It is these entities that reached an agreement with the previous consistory, led by Ada Colau, to regularize the situation of the space. The agreement was not finalized and the current city council, led by Jaume Collboni, now wants to evict the place, claiming that the neighbors are unhappy and that it causes insecurity.
For their part, from l’Antiga Massana they want to enforce the previous agreement, and defend that they have become a social oasis for a chronically needy neighborhood, which is grateful for a community space in the middle of a tourist area. “It is we who are using the space to make a return to the neighborhood, to contribute to a welfare and build a place that can be used by the community,” they say.
Now,the space is pending the execution of the eviction order, while the city council offers no clear plan for the space. Although it includes it in the remodeling of the Plaça de la Gardunya, and some possibilities have been mentioned, such as including it in the expansion of the National Library, the truth is that there is still no clear proposal in this regard.
For the time being, therefore, the two parties are keeping quiet. From the Antiga Massana collective, the clear desire to remain a cultural, social and popular center in a neighborhood like the Raval. From the City Council, the will to vacate the space to return it, for the time being, to the state of abandonment in which it was before the squatting. In the middle, a beautiful building with five centuries of antiquity that now lives its most uncertain future.