The neighbourhood of L’Estació -for the train station of the line Manresa-Berga-Guardiola de Berguedà that stopped in 1973- was built in Sallent in the 1980s on the plain of the right bank of the Llobregat river between the southern end of the existing city and the conveyor belt of salt mineral coming from the ramp of Solà by the last stretch of the Soldevila stream. The neighbourhood was wide, flat and sunny, even more if compared to the narrow and steep streets of the old centre of Sallent on the left bank. In the neighbourhood of L’Estació, many 2-flat houses and a few 4-flat blocks were built. The place was, apparently, unbeatable.
But problems soon appeared as cracks in the houses. The reason was the subsidence of the ground that, years ago, the Enrique potash mine, predecessor of the Vilafruns mine, had drilled out. The plan of the mined area on the right side of the Llobregat river and that of the situation of the affected by unusual cracks buildings agreed. In fact, the first warning of the subsidence of the ground had already been given by the Vilar aqueduct where the Séquia de Manresa crosses the valley of the Soldevila stream; the medieval Vilar aqueduct, which had carried water for 5 centuries, began to overflow during the second half of the 20th century. The reason could not be other than the subsidence of the ground. The accurate topographic measurements at L’Estació started in 1997, by the Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia, and are still going on. At that time, the subsidence was measured as -2.5 cm/year at its maximum rate around Comamala Poal street where the houses had deteriorated the most and, moreover, coinciding with the vertical of the point where a gallery of the Enrique mine had encountered a huge natural cavity. Despite the residents’ complaints and the evidence of the situation, the Sallent City Council, headed during all those years by Jordi Moltó from the party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, kept the qualification of land for development and kept providing licenses for new construction in the L’Estació neighbourhood until the year 2000 when the Generalitat de Catalunya, the higher administration, withdrew the qualification of land for development.
In 2004, the voluntary evacuation of the neighbourhood began. In 2009, after the speed up of the subsidence rate, the Generalitat ordered the forced eviction of the L’Estació neighbourhood because risk of collapse. Most of former residents of L’Estació that were represented by the lawyer Climent Fernàndez with office in Berga left L’Estació subsequent to an agreement with the Generalitat. Currently (2024) the houses have been demolished and the area is nowadays clean, tidy and empty, with urbanized streets although without option of building there. Only three families, disobeying the forced evacuation order, maintain their houses in the neighbourhood at their own risk.
The former neighbourhood of L’Estació -as the images in the gallery show- is now a kind but soulless area, an almost empty park lacking neighbours where a few children take advantage of the empty streets to learn to ride a bike and a few walkers feed the nostalgia of what had been the neighbourhood of their youth.
[photos Jordi Badia]