Plaça de Sant Felip Neri is one of those places where the stones do most of the talking. The church wall facing this small Gothic Quarter square is pitted with deep craters, the kind that stop you mid-step.

For decades, Francoist propaganda insisted the marks were bullet holes from anarchist executions of priests. The truth is grimmer: on 30 January 1938, Italian aircraft allied with Franco dropped two bombs here in quick succession, killing 42 people, most of them children sheltering in the church basement.

The Baroque church, built around 1750, was also a place of daily pilgrimage for Antoni Gaudí, who was on his way here when a tram struck him in 1926. He died three days later.

Today, the square's school uses it as a playground each morning. A fountain sits at the centre, missing its statue of Saint Philip (stolen, replaced, stolen again).

VoiceMap's self-guided tours use the square to trace the Civil War's human cost through Barcelona's streets, connecting the bombing to broader stories of fascism, survival and deliberate forgetting.