Les Corts was a sort of way station where women would be sent over on a regular basis, before being transferred permanently to “sentence-serving” prisons, like Girona o Palma de Mallorca. Hundreds of inmates form Las Ventas prison in Madrid, for instance, passed through Les Corts during the 40’s, after a stopover at the Oblatas prison in Tarragona.

Many of them arrived in Les Corts also from the so called ‘cárceles de partido’ (judicial district prisons), like Badalona, Manresa o Terrassa in the province of Barcelona. The biographies of some of these women have been recently published, like those of Anna Solà Sardans and Antonieta Feliú i Miró, who came from the town of Manresa. 

We feature on this entry a list of women from Terrassa who were inmates at Les Corts, compiled by Rosa María Fernández Sansa. One of them was Quitèria Tarragó, who had been, during 1935 and 1936, the president of the delegation representing the Barcelona districts (comarcas) in Catalonia's Colegio Oficial de Matronas (the Professional Association of Midwives) and served as a member of Terrassa's municipal council the following year. We also include here the interesting research by Dolores Ruiz-Berdún y Alberto Gomis Blanco: an account of the history of midwives in Spain and Catalonia in between 1931 and 1955.

Los Barracones association was originally created with the purpose of restoring the memory and history of the Francoist penal labour camp in Bustarviejo, a village in the ‘Sierra’ in the north of the Madrid province (1944-1952). 

You can find further information related to this forced labour camp and the activities carried out by Los Barracones in this video, and in their Youtube channel.