Catalan secessionists face steepest challenge in Barcelona's bruised beltway

You won’t find Cornellà in a guide book. It lies to the south of Barcelona, just off the motorway and close to the airport, a town whose tower blocks house 86,000 souls, more than half of them born outside Catalonia, mostly elsewhere in Spain. But it’s as much a part of Catalonia as the pretty villages around Girona and on the Costa Brava.

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Cornellà is one of several beltway towns hastily built around Barcelona in the 1960s to house the waves of immigrants fleeing poverty in the south and west of Spain.

“For a long time the streets were just dirt and there were no proper drains,” says Luis Campo Vidal, a TV consultant, who arrived as a child in Cornellà in 1960. “There was a lot of speculation. The builders were supposed to provide services but they didn’t bother.”

Many of the original buildings have since been demolished because of aluminosis – a lung disease caused by aluminium in dust – and the town has now spread to become part of the greater Barcelona metropolitan area.

However, Cornellà and the other beltway towns are expected to play a key role in this month’s election as the conflict over independence drives even the most apathetic voters to the polls. The centre-right Ciutadans party, the leading anti-independence party in the region, has been making inroads into an area with a traditionally low turnout in regional votes.

Residents were enraged by a recent article on a pro-independence news site that described them as Spanish “settlers” implanted in Catalonia.

“That makes me really angry,” says Cèsar Sierra, 23, who was born in Cornellà. “They have broken the consensus that wherever we were from and whether we spoke Catalan or Spanish we shared a political context. Now anyone who doesn’t fit their definition of a Catalan is an outsider. That leaves out half of all Catalans.”

Sierra says he’s weary of so-called identity politics. “My brother is pro-independence but none of the rest of my family is,” he says. “We’ve stopped talking about politics to avoid problems. I don’t know if I feel more Spanish or Catalan but I know for certain I feel like I’m from Barcelona, and from Cornellà.”

Cornellà’s socialist mayor, Antonio Balmón, complains that the independence process has caused administrative paralysis. “The flag has become more important than people’s real needs,” he says.

“Most people here have felt excluded from the secessionist proposal but we never expected it to be such a blow to our coexistence, especially given that nearly all of us are opposed to the present government in Madrid. The secessionists are putting up walls, invisible ones but walls just the same.”

Margarita del Pilar is a retired schoolteacher who came to Cornellà in 1965 from Extremadura in western Spain when she was a child and is now coordinator of the local University of the Elderly, which offers the town’s over-50s a range of 22 courses, from philosophy and history to astronomy and English.

“I’ve never liked borders,” she says. “My mother was from Menorca, my father from Extremadura, my husband is from Castilla y León and my children and grandchildren are from here. I live in Catalonia and I have always stood up for Catalonia. When I was still a teacher here we had 23 nationalities at the school and there was never a fight over nationality in the playground.”

Del Pilar says she is distressed by the independence process. “I haven’t been able to sleep. I suffered from tachycardia [fast heart rate]. I think to get back the coexistence we have lost will take a couple of generations.”

José Antonio Gallego runs a citizens’ security business in Cornellà and also acts as a consultant to the Barcelona tourist board. He and most of his employees are from the town.

“There are people who want to feel Catalan to the exclusion of all other identities but I’m not prepared to waste my energy on that sort of argument,” Gallego says. “There’s a certain snobbishness about it, a failure to distinguish being different from being superior.”

He added: “The independence process has been very painful for us. It’s not real and it doesn’t make any sense.”

Sierra says the Catalan government has always treated Cornellà badly. “We’ve always been Catalonia’s backyard,” he says, insisting this has more to do with class politics than nationalism.

“What I hope for from the elections is a return to common sense. We still have some left,” says Gallego. Balmón, the mayor, says he hopes that neither the pro- nor anti-independence blocs reach an absolute majority so they will have to compromise.

“I hope they’ve learned something from all this,” says Del Pilar. “I don’t know what will happen in [other Catalan towns], but here we’ve been silent and now the silence is over.”