State-directed swamping of Catalonia by immigrants from other parts of Spain

Along with stuff like the banning of the sardana and of Catalan, this is another of the absurd lies told about the Franco regime by Catalanist victimists and by those they manage to con, typically left-leaning Brits and Americans. Here, for example, is the Lonely Planet entry on Barcelona, which is presumably taken seriously at least by its publishers:

Franco wasted no time in banning the Catalan language and flooding the region with impoverished immigrants from Andalucía in the vain hope that the pesky Catalans, with their continual movements for independence, would be swamped. But the plan soured somewhat when the migrants’ children and grandchildren turned out to be more Catalan than the Catalans. Franco even banned one of the Catalans’ joyful expressions of national unity, the sardana, a public circle dance.

I’ve never encountered any evidence to support the deliberate swamping claim, and there’s evidence from regions suffering from devastating depopulation of furious efforts to find ways to discourage the poor and desperate from emigrating to places like Barcelona. Here’s a brief history of the creation of the industrial estate in Albacete with precisely that goal in mind. Economic non-interventionism as practised by Franco’s technocrats may be a terrible thing but it ain’t cultural genocide.

Related posts

• Franco and the golden ages of the sardana
• Falangist sardanas
• Aka the sardana
• Generalitat drops C18th Catalan language ban claim
• Language use survey

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