A hyphen, seven letters, and a sign. That's the change implied by the Congrés metro station becoming Congrés-Indians: they are few letters, but they have a lot behind them, and a lot ahead. Behind, a long-standing claim for neighborhood identity; ahead, an extensive process to reproduce the change in all signage, metro indicators, and hundreds of public transport network maps, which will be done gradually. For now, only one sign has been changed, to begin to highlight the neighborhood's identity, even if initially symbolically, with the impetus of the neighborhood's demand.
With this change on the L5, the map adapts to the reality of the city. Thus, Barcelona's stations not only indicate paths but are a reflection of the city, and change with it, reviewing its memory and recognizing its neighborhoods, usually at the pace of its residents' demands.
Not a few metro stations have changed their names over the decades. In fact, the change of Congrés-Indians was approved by the Autoritat del Transport Metropolità (ATM) in 2022, along with 20 other railway stations, both in Barcelona city and its surroundings. Among them was the change from Vall d'Hebron to Vall d'Hebron-Sant Genís, also long defended by residents. In the Catalan capital, several changes approved in 2022 are still awaiting materialization: Drassanes will be renamed La Rambla-Drassanes, and Llucmajor will be Llucmajor-República, following the renaming of the square ten years ago.
All these changes are debated and approved in the same body: the ATM's Nomenclature Commission, which coordinates and brings together transport operators to coordinate the nomenclature of the public transport network. And the changes are always motivated by three reasons: to unify names of intermodal stations —like Clot metro and Clot-Aragó Renfe, now El Clot—, to differentiate unlinked stations, and to adapt the network names to the reality of the place. These latter are the ones that, often through neighborhood demands, end up leading to changes like that of Vall d'Hebron, or the recent —and symbolic— one of Congrés-Indians.
These are just two of the many changes experienced by a metro network that has accumulated one hundred years and has adapted to the city's reality. Saying that the changes are not few is not just a figure of speech: of the 165 metro stations, about 50 have seen their original name modified —and in some cases, more than once—, especially on the historic lines: about 20 on both L1 and L5, and fifteen on L3 and also on L4.
Many of these renamings were motivated by the change from Castilian to Catalan in the nomenclature, as recorded by Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) on the occasion of the metro's centenary. Torres y Bages, Las Cortes, Rocafor, Plaza del Centro, Pueblo Seco —now Paral·lel, while the former Parlament stop has kept the name Poble Sec—, or Luchana (Llacuna) are some of them.
But other changes have gone beyond idiomatic issues: the very busy Sants Estació was initially the Roma station, after the nearby avenue, and Besòs-Mar acquired its current name in 1985, three years after opening as Mina. Aragón became Aragón-Gran Vía to become Passeig de Gràcia in 1982, the same year that Verdaguer dropped its original Francoist name of General Mola, in a network that has seen names change such as Guinardó to Guinardó-Hospital de Sant Pau and Triunfo-Norte to Arc de Triomf. Of all of them, one of the stations that has changed its name the most in the metro network has been Ciutadella-Vila Olímpica. The station opened in 1977 as Ribera; with the reorganization of L4 it became Ciutadella, and added the reference to Vila Olímpica precisely in 1992.
The protagonist of the last change is not far behind: the now Congrés-Indians was supposed to open as Garcilaso, after the street that hosts it, but finally took the name of the neighborhood: Viviendas del Congreso, under construction at that time. The history of the neighborhood has nothing to envy to that of the station in terms of uniqueness: the housing complex was promoted by Gregorio Modrego, then bishop of the city, taking the name of the International Eucharistic Congress, which took place in Barcelona in 1952. It was in 1959 when the station entered service, then on the L2, and moved to the L5 with its extension between Diagonal and La Sagrera. The second name change came with its Catalanization, in 1982, and the third is already materializing, with Congrés-Indians.
Just as Congrés comes from the International Eucharistic Congress, where does that Indians come from? The neighborhood's name has included it for 20 years, to represent a unique area with a very different personality from the Congrés blocks. The area began to be known as dels Indians as a result of another historical event: the Cuban War and the return of Barcelonians who had made their fortune in the Americas. Some of them chose those then-uninhabited lands of Sant Andreu del Palomar to build residences that reflected their wealth, which drew a landscape of towers and houses like Torre Rosa; built in 1920, it still stands transformed into a cocktail bar.
The streets of the neighborhood are a clear reflection of that Caribbean heritage: Manigua, Puerto Príncipe, Matanzas, and Cienfuegos are some of them. Again, names that become witnesses to a moment in the city's reality, now turned into history. Between Manigua and that Garcilaso street where the metro is taken, a now-disappeared wasteland was the scene of another of the neighborhood's historical episodes, whose impact extends to now and globally: it hosted the first field in the history of FC Barcelona at the beginning of the century, when there was no metro, no Congrés, no Indians. Reflecting the origin and history of the neighborhood and the neighborhood's demand for all of it to be present, now there is the station, its hyphen, its seven letters, and a neighborhood identity represented —albeit symbolically—.