Calle de Abdón Terradas

Abdón Terradas i Pulí was born in Figueres in 1812 and died in Medina Sidonia in 1856, and between those two dates he found almost every possible way to trouble the powers of his time. He trained in Perpignan and in 1840 settled in Barcelona, where he founded a secret society to spread a republican and federal creed that still sounded like heresy. The people of Figueres elected him mayor in 1842, but the authorities refused the result: Terradas would not swear loyalty to the regency of Espartero. The vote was repeated up to five times, always with the same name. From exile in France he wrote the words of La campana, an anthem set to music by Anselm Clavé that became a republican battle cry, so charged that singing it could end in arrest. The revolution of 1854 returned him to the mayor’s office for a few months, until the captain general dismissed him and banished him to the south. Ill, he died far from his homeland. In the Gaztambide neighborhood, a plaque brings his name to a Madrid he never governed.