BACK TO NORMAL.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 100, 28 March 1939, Page 7

BACK TO NORMAL.

CITY OF BARCELONA

LONDON, March 16

It has been fascinating to watch the quickening of a great city which was previously almost moribund, says a special correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, in paying a tribute to the Spanish Nationalists for their first steps in reconstructing the business and social life of Barcelona. They are tackling this task with tire same energy they displayed elsewhere. As a result the city is rapidly emerging from its prolonged wartime misery. Cafes and restaurants are being reopened, and the boulevards, so recently desolate, are regaining their spruceness and swarming with shoeshine men, photographers and sweet sellers, who supply well-dressed crowds. The correspondent adds that the Nationalists, on entering Barcelona, after two and a half years’ warfare, found the wealthiest R)>anish city—which was also the most important industrially—battered and squalid, with a population swollen by thousands of refugees. RECONSTRUCTION COMMISSION. Finance and industry were in chaos, and the port was blocked by 23 sunken vessels.

The Nationalists, in readiness for such problems, formed a reconstruction commission to deal with each city the Republicans had held. The Barcelona Commission, headed by Count Mousey, a lawyer and business man, entering tho city the day after the Nationalist troops, immediately began restarting cotton spinning, tanning and metallurgy, and advancing money to enable materials to be purchased and workers to be paid. Tho commissiou will restore factories to the owners who were deprived of them when the Republicans collectivised industry. Many of the plants have boon damaged and require new machinery. The commission is also aiming at the speediest possible general return to normality, including the reopening of shops and cinemas, and the reorganising of traffic. Military lorries are replacing hundreds of umisuable pre-war vehicles.

i The president of a motor company, Sennr Miguel Mateo, the new Mayor, is ambitiously replanning the town whore air raid damage was greatest. The food problem is being solved. In spite of many shortages, menus are daily becoming more varied and appetising. . Brown bread is improving, but it is believed that Spain’s wheat supply, because of crop shortage, will bo 20 I per cent, below requirements.