Alicante's Underground

Evenings, Alicante comes to life.  Shadows swell, the sun has weakened and will soon drop. A breeze kicks up to toss the locks of women and men, all the while it also kisses cheeks universally, with no worry about gender. 

The sidewalks fill with people sauntering or sitting at sidewalk cafes. The tables that ring the broad Luceros Roundabout—a main spot of connection and entrance to the underdeveloped underworld, Alicante’s tram—fill to overflowing. More so than the circle’s fountain.   

The city really does have an underground and not just from tram tracks. During the Spanish Civil War, when German and Italian planes would appear from seemingly nowhere, over the sea or over land, and drop bombs, rotten eggs of destruction, the city dug and constructed bomb shelters.  They were big enough and numerous enough to hold much of the population that then lived here.

Of course the victorious fascists, the Nationalist and their dictator Francisco Franco did not wish to remember when they rained destruction through their allies on the Mediterranean Coast that was strongly committed to the Republic and to internationalist causes of reform and even revolution.

That combination of governing a Republic relying on a combination of parties including Leninists, Trotsyists, Trotskyites, and many varieties of anarchists who wanted radical and even revolutionary change was an often tense and shifting achilles heel. 

Nonetheless, the bomb shelters remained under Alicante mouldering.  Since then, with the development of downtown as a shopping and entertainment, place—an extended mall—along with a massive increase in cars and trucks, the underground was expanded to create vast parking lots. 

With the recent development of tourism, migration, and a new pride Alicante began cleaning out the bomb shelters and rehabilitating them.  Many are now places where tourists can visit such that the buried past of the city and of the fascists can become known even if only infrequently can it rise and spread on the city’s surface.

Knowing Alicante with its complex and nuanced histories under our feet and to our sides, has been the task of a small group of writers and of institutions such as the University of Alicante and the Ayuntamiento (the City Government). 

Aiding them in this work that threatens people who depend on the established Nationalist versions of history, have been people who read and discuss. For them, book stores have been key places to meet and discuss this history and much else, as well as to peruse books, including the novels and poems of Alicantinos and an entire world of writers. 

The city’s surface seems placid, with street-side cafes and picture snapping hoards of tourists. (We have just been told that given occupancy rates of hotels, tourist season now extends into October). Yet it contains a vast underground that is mostly empty other than for occasional tour groups and loads of automobiles. 

In some ways, this is a metaphor for a city whose past seems like and extended Freudian space beneath it. Despite the efforts of historians and its intellectuals, that history remains widely unknown. 

In nearby Valencia, bats that come out from there are considered saviors of the city. That powerful image extends into Alicante and may help explain why Alicante encourages setting up bat nests throughout the city. In any case, as creatures that live at night and often come out of the underground, bats seem an apt symbol for denizens of Alicante’s often hidden past underground. 

At night, when the sidewalks fill with people and cafes rumble from vivid conversations, bats fly on the hunt for insects and thereby suggest the missing stories of this city with an underdeveloped underground.