Police station and site of Franco-era tortures declared Place of Democratic Memory

The Spanish government's Official State Gazette (BOE) has published the declaration of the Via Laietana police station in Barcelona as a Place of Democratic Memory.

However, the site of Franco-era tortures will remain open as a functioning National Police station, but it must include markings of spaces of torture and political persecution.

The resolution establishes that the current police headquarters building was "the main node of the network of spaces and repressive bodies of the Franco dictatorship" in Catalonia.

The agreement rules that the history of the building must be explained and marked in the building itself, while visits will be made possible to certain areas.

The website of the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory will also have a section dedicated to the building, with photographs and explanations.

From 1941 until Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, the building housed the Political-Social Brigade — Franco’s secret police in charge of suppressing dissent — and anti-Francoists were routinely interrogated and tortured there. 

One of these people is Carles Vallejo, the president of the Former Political Prisoners Francoism Association. Active in the labor movement, Vallejo was arrested in 1970 at age 20 and tortured at the police station for 20 days straight before being sent to Barcelona’s La Model prison. 

“I try to avoid Via Laietana because it all comes flooding back,” Vallejo told Catalan News in late 2020, then 45 years after Franco’s death. Life in prison, he said, was better than at the police station, despite being held in solitary confinement for a month: there was no “direct torture” there. 

It is estimated that at least 4,143 people were arrested in Barcelona for political activity during the dictatorship.

Torture victim testifies

In May 2025, 82-year-old activist Blanca Serra testified before the Prosecutor's Office of Democratic Memory in Barcelona, hoping that her case will pave the way for the investigation and recognition of more victims of police abuse during the Franco regime and Spain's transition to democracy.

Serra, accompanied by civil society organizations and fellow activists, emphasized her determination to share her story, the first time a torture survivor from the infamous Via Laietana police station has testified before prosecutors.

Blanca and her late sister Eva Serra suffered both physical and psychological abuse in February 1977, as part of systematic political repression which had been imposed during the fascist dictatorship.