‘Freedom’: exhibition celebrates Barcelona’s 1970s counterculture

Underground recalls brief but intense flowering of movement in city following death of Franco

When Spain's repressive dictatorship finally came to a close with the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the counterculture that had been bubbling away for years elsewhere in Europe arrived with a bang.

After years of repression there was an immense desire to do things; people were desperate to express themselves," said Pepe Ribas, the curator of Underground, an exhibition that celebrates the intense but brief flowering of counter-culture of 1970s Barcelona.