The Aragonese city that is a thousand times better than London

The city of London is the financial district of the British capital. The of Zaragoza It is a university campus surrounded by streets with bars where knowledge is spread and bonds and friendships are created in the breaks between classes. Each one decides which is the good city. These days, Plaza San Francisco is once again filled with life with the start of the school year in an area through which the Aragonese capital was expanded several decades ago and without which the city would not have the same character.

Arranged around a central park, the buildings of the San Francisco campus have witnessed countless revelries. Today, When partying is penalized outside of clubs, the atmosphere on the grass is calm but there is a freedom that does not exist in other green areas. of the city. People lie on the ground to chat, read and sunbathe. The public space is used as such, as an extension of the usual meeting places where people socialise. In other gardens in the city it seems that it is a shame to even open a can of Coca-Cola if you are not sitting on the terrace of a bar.

Central park of the San Francisco campus, with the Interfaculty building.

It was in the turbulent decade of the 1930s that this campus was conceived after a plan to build “cheap houses” was abandoned. (that was what they were called). These plots of land were intended to be used to enlarge the city. But then a need arose: to expand the spaces of the University of Zaragoza, whose headquarters were at that time in the Plaza de la Magdalena, in a building with centuries of history that ended up, like so many other architectural gems of the city, being a victim of the pickaxe.

In exchange The current Pedro de Luna Institute was builta building that, despite its good intentions, has nothing to do with the quality and beauty of what was always the home of Zaragoza’s university students. There remains as a vestige of a better past (at least as far as beauty is concerned) the Universidad street, where between the 60s and 70s politicians decided to destroy a building that had accumulated the knowledge of numerous generations. But today there is no remedy.

Plaza de La Magdalena with the old university on the right.

Returning to the San Francisco campus, it began to be planned in 1933, when a competition was launched that was eventually won by Regino Borobio and José Beltrán, responsible together with Ricardo Magdalena and José de Yarza (both deceased at the beginning of the 20th century) for the design of the current Zaragoza.

In 1935 Borobio and Beltrán began to work and that same year construction began on the Faculty of Philosophy, now completely renovated. In 1939, after the civil war, work began on the Law Department, and in 1950, on the Science Department.

In the meantime, these lands have experienced dark times. In 1938, the huge esplanade created to expand the city was used as an exhibition area for fascism. That year, Franco presided over a celebration attended by thousands of blue shirts who, torch in hand and following the same iconography as the Nazis in Germany, celebrated the coup d’état carried out two years earlier and the union of the Falange Española Tradicionalista and the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET-JONS) into a single party. The images that survive from that time are hair-raising.

Falange event on the esplanade that today occupies the area around Plaza San Francisco in 1938. / GAZA

After the war and the years of post-war hardship, the campus began to receive more and more students, so extensions had to be made to the existing buildings.

Extensions and renovations

New buildings also began to emerge, especially during the 60s and 70s, while the destruction of the Magdalena University was taking place. These decades are the Interfacultades building, the School of Education –which later became the Faculty of Education– and Medicine. While the facilities were being completed, such as the sports facilities and the urbanisation of the entire area, which has now become the University district, a somewhat redundant name if the objection is possible.

For a few years now, after several years stuck in the grey atmosphere typical of buildings built during the Franco regime, The San Francisco campus is experiencing a second youthThe first step in this conversion was the construction of the new Faculty of Education, which broke with the prevailing aesthetic with an angular concrete building. Years later, too many, the long-awaited renovation of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters came about, which has had its new look for less than a year. The comprehensive renovation of the medical buildings and also of all sports facilities will soon be carried out, a thorough facelift that will transform the San Francisco campus into an enviable university environment.

To all these works the announced reform of Pedro Cerbuna street will be addedwithout which the city would not be the city. In the previous term, the Councillor for Urban Planning, Víctor Serrano, proposed creating a superblock around the campus that would have meant the pedestrianisation of all the adjacent streets and the connection of the campus with the city, now separated by a fence.

The plan was scrapped due to Vox’s refusal, but the city still has to improve the integration of a campus that represents, like few others, the freedom that youth grants.