Vila Olímpica

In two thousand seventeen, anthropologist María Gabriela Navas-Perrone looked for people who could reconstruct from memory the vanished streets of what is now Vila Olímpica. Of twelve former residents, three agreed to walk through the neighborhood with her. One of them was Jordi Boronat. He was born here, on Carrer d'Àlaba, in a family house occupying numbers eleven through fifteen.

The house served several generations of the Boronat family. Horses and horse-drawn carts were kept in the courtyard—they remained here until nineteen seventy-one. Nearby stood factories, small workshops, warehouses, and other homes. The final census of old Icària counted five hundred four people and around forty businesses. Many families came from Valencia and Huesca to work at these businesses and settled nearby. Jordi remembered how the whole neighborhood's routine matched the factories': workers went home for lunch and then returned to the machines.

When Barcelona was awarded the nineteen ninety-two Olympic Games, the organizers needed to house athletes close to the center while also creating a permanent residential district on the site. A team of architects was tasked with planning apartments for participants in the Games to use for several weeks, before ordinary families moved in.

To do this, they decided to clear away all the existing buildings. On August third, nineteen eighty-seven, contractors began demolishing the factories, warehouses, and homes. Icària's residents were rehoused in new municipal housing blocks or paid compensation. Jordi's family left its house on Carrer d'Àlaba; along with their neighbors, they lost both the courtyard and the street where people had known one another for generations.

Future owners of many of the new apartments paid for them before the Olympics, helping to finance construction. The keys were temporarily handed over to the organizers. In the summer of nineteen ninety-two, Olympians lived in these rooms, followed by Paralympians. After the competitions, workers reconfigured the apartments, and permanent residents began moving in in December. This is the district's literal name: Vila Olímpica was an athletes' village for only a few months, but it was built from the start as urban housing.

Jordi avoided this neighborhood for a long time. During his walk with the anthropologist, he nevertheless reached the plot where he was born and pointed out the exact location of the family house. Not a single wall remains of it: a padel court stands there. Of all industrial Icària, only the brick chimney of the Can Folch factory survives above the new residential blocks.