Take a look at Memòria Digital de Catalunya’s collections of posters on Europeana. With over 2,000 posters, the collections range from sports to politics, advertisements and cultural events, giving us a unique insight into Catalonia’s history.

Here, for example, you can find political posters from the Josep Vinyals collection. According to Vinyals, a private collector, “the endeavour to preserve a bit of the past when it was present … was done without aiming to be exhaustive. That is, it was not about collecting all posters done on all political areas and everywhere during a particular period of time. It was simply about gathering posters from political parties, trade unions, a variety of societies, campaigns, elections, etc., that would give evidence of some events that … have become contemporary history”.

The Vinyals collection reflects the political climate in Catalonia in the 1970s and 1980s, a very intense period of time for Catalonia and Spain in social and political fields. This period of transition from the Franco regime towards the building of a new State resulted in a remarkable emergence of political acronyms.

Militant left in its broadest sense has a strong presence in this collection. We find organisations that were later on institutionalised or those that disappeared as a consequence of political and social changes in the country. We see associations or groupings that were born with the will to pursuing a particular demand, political organisations taking part in elections but also “anti-system” or “anti-establishment” groups.

See other great posters from Memòria Digital de Catalunya:

-Institution: Biblioteca de Catalunya
Subject: Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), advertisements, shows, and a wide range of posters about politics and unions in England in the early 20th century.

-Institution: Biblioteca de Comerç i Turisme
Description: Catalonia tourist attractions, landscapes, towns, cities, cultural heritage, festivals, etc. – Published by the Government of Catalonia from 1979 to 2008.

-Institution: Biblioteca de l’Esport
Subject: History of Catalan sport.

-Institution: University of Barcelona
Subject: Political events, economic, social and cultural history of Catalonia and Spain for the period of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

-Institution: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Subject: Political posters.

*We want to thank Eugenia Serra Aranda from Biblioteca de Catalunya for contributing to this post.