The profile managed by Joaquim Campa has viralized photographs and historical documents on social networks
In his Twitter account he accumulates more than 14,000 followers interested in the history of Barcelona
The creator spends his free time searching international archives to update his ‘timeline’
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You will find it on the networks as ‘El Boig de Can Fanga’. Joaquim Campa is the person behind this Twitter account, where in just six months he has already accumulated more than 14,000 followers. “Follow me and you will see a historical image every day”, he promises in his biography.
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Campa created this profile in January of this year to share stories, anecdotes, legends and secrets of Barcelona, the city where you live. She did so after verifying that the followers of his personal Twitter account multiplied exponentially when he began to share threads with historical photos and information. Soon exceeded 100,000 followers.
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It is what made him take the step to found this new specialized account. In it, he would separate his personal opinions to dedicate all the space to disseminating photographs, videos and documents of the old Barcelona. Authentic pearls from the city’s past that have sparked a growing interest in the population in recent times, as its monitoring on social networks has shown.
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Campa is not a historian, but he defines himself as a passionate about history. A passion that comes from her family and that makes her dedicate her free time to it. “Every day I spend an hour looking for material to update the account, when I’m not working and the kids are sleeping,” she explains. She likes to find unknown material and she finds it mostly in foreign files, such as the United States Library of Congress or the national archives of other countries. “I have come to pay for some documents,” confesses the twitterer, who claims to have become a “collector offline y online”.
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Secrets of the history of Barcelona
La Rambla, Plaza de Espanya, Diagonal, Gran Vía de les Corts, Paral lel… and a long list of places in the city have their place in the timeline from ‘El Boig de Can Fanga’. From the most central squares to the peripheral area, Campa collects in his tweets the effects of the passing of the years for them. “There is a Barcelona that has changed a lot over time”, he explains, “it is especially noticeable in the neighbourhoods; the center has hardly changed.
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In his account, Campa shows the city completely covered in snow in 1962, a Sagrada Familia that stands out on the city’s horizon without large buildings around it, recently entered the 20th century, or a Nudo de la Trinitat that goes from being an agricultural space to a modern road infrastructure in just one year, during the Olympic stage. An unknown Barcelona for many and that now ceases to be so thanks to the reach of the social network.
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The best for Campa: when a teacher tells him that he has used his account in class to teach history to the youngest. ‘El Boig de Can Fanga’ has shown that Twitter can become a educational tool. As the creator says, “it can provide knowledge to those who already know, but above all it can attract a new audience.”
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The stories behind the tweets
Joaquim Campa’s task is not limited to informative work. With his tweets he also complies a social function: that of memory and nostalgia, in the best of its senses. He always tries to “find short stories” behind the historical documents. “I posted the video of a family who had never seen it and they contacted me,” he recalls. The anecdote had a lot of repercussion and Campa mentions it with special affection.
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What he likes most is discovering in the archives Scenes from everyday life. Years ago, only high society had access to the material to take photographs or videos, which is why they are the protagonists of most historical documents. “It’s very special when you come to a document that shows a more real scene,” he concludes.
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