Changing the end of the war

@It is early Jan­u­ary 1939. In their rapid ad­vance from the Aragón front, the high com­mand of the Na­tion­al­ist rebel troops has set up an op­er­a­tions cen­tre in the small town of Al­co­letge (Segrià, Lleida). It is here where the prepa­ra­tions begin for the final of­fen­sive against Cat­alo­nia. The Re­pub­li­can forces are due to send their air force to bom­bard the base within the hour. In the mean­time, a bat­tal­ion has been dis­patched to ob­tain the plans for the up­com­ing op­er­a­tion. If they man­age to get them, they might be able to stop the of­fen­sive, and who knows how that could change the course of the war. Yet if they don’t get there in time, they will be caught in the deadly bom­bard­ment.

This is the set-up for a new es­cape room that the Civil War Her­itage In­ter­pre­ta­tion Cen­tre “Er­men­gol Piró” in the Lleida town of Al­co­letge will soon open on week­ends with the help of a grant from the De­mo­c­ra­tic Memo­r­ial his­tor­i­cal mem­ory or­gan­i­sa­tion. “We al­ready do guided tours, but we wanted more dy­namic and par­tic­i­pa­tory ac­tiv­i­ties and to ex­pand what we can offer the vis­i­tor,” says Laura Pinto, the ar­chae­ol­o­gist and the ini­tia­tive’s ide­o­log­i­cal ed­u­ca­tor.

The ini­tial pro­posal was for a game of clues as part of the se­ries of ed­u­ca­tional ac­tiv­i­ties on offer in the fa­cil­i­ties. How­ever, that be­came an idea to use leisure ac­tiv­i­ties to ad­dress an adult au­di­ence not used to vis­it­ing cen­tres like Er­men­gol Piró. The re­sult is a space on the mu­seum’s upper floor has been turned into an es­cape room.

“Apart from it being a game, we want the ac­tiv­ity to have his­tor­i­cal rigour. We have set it at a key mo­ment when the final of­fen­sive against Cat­alo­nia is be­gin­ning, after the Segre front was bro­ken, the Re­pub­li­can forces de­feated and Cat­alo­nia be­came quickly oc­cu­pied,” says Pinto.

Tech­ni­cally the new ac­tiv­ity is a mix be­tween an es­cape room and a hall es­cape. While the for­mer con­sists of a group of peo­ple es­cap­ing a room by solv­ing a se­ries of puz­zles in a set time, a hall es­cape is much more about solv­ing the puz­zles to com­plete a par­tic­u­lar mis­sion or goal.

Mean­while, the or­gan­is­ers have gone to great lengths to take care of every de­tail in order to recre­ate the pe­riod: there are maps show­ing mil­i­tary op­er­a­tions in the area, fuel tanks, sol­diers’ hel­mets, orig­i­nal cloth­ing and pro­pa­ganda posters, along with dif­fer­ent en­vi­ron­ments, such as the com­man­der’s of­fice, presided over by a cru­ci­fix.

The ex­pe­ri­ence be­gins with an ex­pla­na­tion to pro­vide the par­tic­i­pants with the his­tor­i­cal con­text. The play­ers then have to un­cover clues, hid­den codes and solve puz­zles. “It will be the first Civil War es­cape room,” says man­ager, Jez­abel Pizarro.

Fea­ture Her­itage