'Hemingway Route Tour' to open in Tortosa

Barcelona (ACN) – A new tourist route tour dedicated to American writer and Nobel Prize winner Ernst Hemingway will be launched on 24 July in Tortosa, a southern Catalan city located in the Ebre Delta. The opening will take place during the 20th edition of the Renaissance Festival, an annual international event picturing life during the 16th century and attracting tourists from all over the world. The launch of the new route aims at celebrating Hemingway's short stay in the Catalan city in 1938, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). It also follows the restoration of the largest air-raid shelter in the town and the renaming of the street where it is located after the American author.

The new 'Hemingway Route' will be a walking tour beginning with air-raid shelter number 4 (opened this year during Holy Week) and ending with the old railway bridge over the Ebro river, where traces of the war are still visible. It will cover various parts of the Eixample (a 19^th century central neighbourhood) and the city's historic centre. On the one hand, the tour will explore the writer's body of work, his work as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the chronicles on the bombing of Tortosa he wrote in April 1938. On the other hand, it will also show the city's social, political and commercial climate in the late 1930s. 

With capacity of 400 people, the route's starting point – air-raid shelter number 4 – was the largest in the Catalan city (which hosted more than 20 in total), aimed at protecting the civil population from aerial bombing. It involves a system of narrow galleries, dug into ground of clay and rounded pebbles. It has a paved floor and walls of brick and cement.

Hemingway is one of the most popular foreign journalists to cover the Civil War

Hemingway is one of the most popular foreign journalists who came to Spain to cover the Civil War, together with George Orwell. He described the destruction of Tortosa by the Fascists through chronicles written between the 4^th and 18^th of April 1938. ‘Bombing of Tortosa’ is one of them, from 15 April 1938 (when 12 air strikes were carried out on the city) and is considered an iconic account of the civil conflict.

The America author arrived in Spain in 1937 with the intention of reporting and was present at the Battle of the Ebre. 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' (1940) is Hemingway’s novel many foreigners today associate with the Spanish Civil War. "Well I was not in Guernica. But I was in Mora de l’Ebre, Tortosa, Reus, Tarragona, Sagunto, and many other towns when Franco did exactly what he denies having done in Guernica", reads a quote from 'Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961'.