Catalan nationalists have denounced several times the Columbus Spanish parafernalia. In 1987 the Spanish police detonated a bomb that had been left near the Santa Maria, a replica of the ship Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492 and a popular tourist attraction.On the Spanish racist Día de la Raza (Columbus Day) on October 12th, 1987 members of the Catalan Nationalist Youth assaulted the ship to protest against the Spanish imperialism defending decolonization and denouncing the Spanish colonization in America with milions of deaths.
In addition to putting the Native Americans to work as slaves in his gold mines, Columbus sold sex slaves to his men, some as young as 9. Columbus and his Spanish men raided Native TTaino villages for sex and sport. Columbus began rewarding his lieutenants with sex slaves -- particularly young girls who had been forced into sexual slavery. In a letter to a friend, Columbus remarked upon how girls between the ages of nine and ten could be used as currency. In the year 1500, Columbus wrote: "A hundred Castillian are as easily obteained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand".
The ship not a 'caravel', was a replica of dubious historicism built to make the 1951 film Alba de América, a piece of Franco's Spanish Fascist filmography designed to honor the exploits of the Spanish Imperialism. Shortly after his film intervention, the ship stopped at the dock of Barcelona, where it soon became a tourist attraction of the late Franco regime and the first years of democracy.
Later, in 1989, the Catalan military organization Terra Lliure (Free Land) considered the ship to be a symbol of Spanishness and attacked the ship, causing a couple of fires in May 1990. In the second one the symbol was damaged enough for the port authorities to realize that the repairs were more expensive than the revenue the ship could bring in, and in the midst of the Olympic fever they chose to remove it. Shortly afterwards, it was towed towards the Maresme offshore and sunk at the height of Arenys de Mar.
Barcelona's Pro independence Catalan have demanded several times to remove the Columbus monuments as a symbol of imperialisme, and a tribute to a slavetrader. In 2016 the monument was defaced with paitings on the Columbus Day and in 2018 pro independence councillors demanded the removal of the monument but pro Spanish mayor (Unidas Podemos) refused to remove the symbol. It's time for Justice.
Petition to topple the monument.
In 2016 the monument was defaced calling for decolonisation.
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