There is a modernist window embedded in the façade of an El Corte Inglés. If you want to understand what this story is about, start there.

It sits on Fontanella street, on Plaça Catalunya, the central plaza of Barcelona, and you get a good view of it from Carrer d'Estruc, an alley some tourists mistake for a urinal. If you don't look for it you won't see it, because nobody lifts their head walking in to buy socks. Three Gothic arches over columns, a carved balustrade, four stone muses playing instruments. Antoni Maria Gallissà designed them around 1906 for the music room of a bourgeois townhouse. Today they hang off a grey department-store wall like a mounted head on a hunter's living-room. That is exactly what they are: a trophy. Proof that something stood here, and that the something was killed.

The gallery belonged to Casa Sicart, and Casa Sicart no longer exists. They tore it down to make the store bigger. When the building came down the gallery shattered, so someone had the idea (somewhere between guilt and cynicism, which in Spanish urban planning tend to go hand in hand) to cast a replica in reinforced artificial stone and nail it to the new wall. A keepsake of sorts, the kind of in memoriam commissioned by the same hand that ordered the demolition.

This is about a company (the biggest, the best loved, the one holding a sentimental monopoly over several generations of Spanish Christmas shopping) that built some of its flagship temples on the country's demolished heritage: palaces, convents, a legendary hotel, a women's prison, a whole neighbourhood among them. And it is about a country where this happened, much of it under a dictatorship, and was then forgotten so completely that most people never knew it had happened at all.

It's worth placing the suspect, because every crime has one and this one wears an Emidio Tucci tie. El Corte Inglés grows out of a tailor's shop on Preciados street that one Ramón Areces, an Asturian from Grado seasoned at the El Encanto department store in Havana, buys in 1935 with his uncle's money and backing. From seven employees to devouring all of Spain, the kind of biography that in this country gets told with a tear in the eye and a brass plaque bolted to some little square.

But that is not the figure that matters. The figure that matters is the date: the company launches its great expansion in the 1960s, in the thick of Franco's desarrollismoDesarrollismoSpain's economic boom of the 1960s, when the Franco dictatorship prioritised rapid growth: highways, high-rise blocks and mass tourism, often at the cost of historic city centres., just when Spain decided the past was a nuisance and that progress was measured in square metres of poured concrete. Put plainly: they let the wolf loose and, at the same time, threw open the gates of the pen.

The Italians have a word for what happened then: sventramento, a gutting. Slicing open the historic heart of a city to force modernity inside it. In Spain we prefer not to name it, because what goes unnamed expires sooner, but we did it anyway, with the giddy enthusiasm and the faith in brick of those years. And El Corte Inglés, a selling machine with the heritage sensitivity of a steamroller, needed land in the centre of the big cities; and since the centre was already occupied, it bought it block by block and knocked down whatever stood on top. It just bites, spits out the rubble and moves on. And the cash register, three years later, makes the same noise but cleaner: click, click, click, on top of everything that made a city a city, and not a shop floor.

We have to be fair about one distinction, because without it this becomes a screed, and a screed collapses on its own. Not every one of these crimes was committed by the same hand. For half a century two Asturian giants fought over the Spanish wallet: Ramón Areces's El Corte Inglés and Pepín Fernández's Galerías Preciados, both family through the same uncle, César Rodríguez (Pepín's cousin, Areces's uncle), and all three trained at the same Havana store, El Encanto. Relatives, rivals, condemned to hate each other in business and love each other at funerals. Galerías fell (debts, the Rumasa holding, the 1983 state seizure, a Venezuelan owner, then a British one) and in 1995 El Corte Inglés swallowed it whole. It inherited the stores and, with them, some of their dead. So in certain cases the actual executioner was Pepín, and El Corte Inglés merely kept the house with the ghost inside.

On Plaza del Callao, one of the central plazas of Madrid, the capital of Spain, where an El Corte Inglés now sells perfume with some actress's face on it, stood the Hotel Florida. Antonio Palacios built it between 1922 and 1924, the man who designed the Cibeles Palace, the Círculo de Bellas Artes and even the Madrid metro logo. Ten storeys, two hundred rooms with bath and telephone, the façade clad in white marble. An indecent amount of modernity for its day.

And then the war came and the Florida turned into one of the most storied addresses of the twentieth century and an emblem of the Republic. While shells fell on the Gran Vía (the avenue of the shells, they called it) the guests included Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos, Saint-Exupéry, André Malraux. And two young photographers in love who were inventing war photojournalism: Endre Ernő Friedmann and Gerda Taro, both creators of the Robert Capa persona. The rooms facing the street, the ones that caught the shrapnel, were the cheapest, which tells you something fairly exact about the era's sense of humour. One night in April 1937 two bombs hit the building and Hemingway, who had no rival when it came to grand gestures, declared he had great confidence in the Florida. The hotel survived the entire war.

In 1964, Galerías Preciados (here the executioner was Pepín, for the record) bought it and tore it down to build a department store. Nobody protested. It was the desarrollismo: a building by Antonio Palacios, loaded with the memory of the defence of Madrid, was worth less than a shop window. On that lot stands today the El Corte Inglés in Callao, which inherited it in 1995.

In 2019, fifty-five years later, a plaque went up. The company itself promoted it. It says the Hotel Florida stood there, 1924 to 1964, a meeting place for writers and correspondents. It does not say who tore it down, or why. Plaques, in this country, point our bad conscience at vanished monuments, and bad conscience says things like: here such-and-such was demolished, here they killed X, here this much was lost, we're terribly sorry but…

If one case sums it all up, it is in Seville, the largest city in southern Spain, and it fits inside a cheque. Until the 1960s, Plaza del Duque, in the historic centre, was a cluster of seigneurial palaces. The Marqués de Palomares's, raised on the old lot of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia. Miguel Sánchez-Dalp's neo-Mudéjar palace, a regionalist fantasy by the architect Simón Barris that the chroniclers held up as the very model of what the Sevillian style ought to be. And the Alfonso X school. El Corte Inglés bought them in 1966 and tore them down to open its department store on 8 March 1968. Earlier, the Teatro del Duque had fallen, and in 1963 the Cavaleri palace, of which only the Renaissance doorway survived (another mounted head, another Fontanella window avant la lettre, wedged today into an annex of the store).

So far, the usual story. What turns it into something else is what came next, and we know it with a notary's precision thanks to the doctoral thesis of the architect Pedro Barrero Ortega, defended at the University of Seville in 2017 under Antonio Gámiz Gordo. Ramón Areces, the founder of El Corte Inglés, handed the cheque to the mayor of Seville, Félix Moreno de la Cova, in the lounge of the Hotel Alfonso XIII, the city's grandest. The figure matched, to the peseta, the expropriation value of a different palace: 5,455,368 pesetas.

Read the concept again. The cheque did not pay for the three palaces it tore down; nothing could. It paid for the one it did not touch, the Pinelo, and it called that moral compensation. A crumbling Renaissance palace, restored with that money, today the seat of two royal academies. The arithmetic is honest to the point of cruelty. One palace is saved because three were killed. Sevillian culture collected the ransom on one hostage with the money from the kidnapping of the others.

And everyone went home happy: the city got its restored palace, the company got its store and its charitable headline, and the three demolished buildings vanished from the record the way a body vanishes in a well-solved crime. When a company puts a peseta price on its own destruction and pays it without a tremor, it means it ran the numbers and they add up. That is the real document of the operation: the cheque.

And then there is the Diagonal, the great avenue that cuts across Barcelona. This is no longer about art, nor about the abstract sorrow left by a pretty building that is gone. This is about women and children, and about a building whose value lay not in what it looked like but in what was done inside it, and there is no more thorough machine of forgetting than a department store that sells everything, open even on Sundays.

The El Corte Inglés on the Diagonal, beside Plaça Reina Maria Cristina, opened on 16 March 1974. Beneath it (literally beneath the fitting rooms and the escalators) had stood Franco's women's prison in Barcelona. The site had been a medieval farmhouse and then a convent asylum; in October 1936 the Republican Generalitat turned it into a women's correctional, and in January 1939, when Franco's troops marched in, it became what it would be for sixteen years: a warehouse for the punished.

The numbers were established by the historian Fernando Hernández Holgado from the register of admissions and releases held in Catalonia's National Archive.

And the figure that truly admits no euphemism: during the first three years after the war, eleven prisoners from Les Corts were taken out and shot on the sands of the Camp de la Bota. The first was Carme Claramunt, executed in 1939. In her farewell letter she wrote that they were killing an innocent woman. She was right, but in 1939 that saved nobody.

The prison closed in 1955. The lot ended up, through a real-estate deal, in the hands of El Corte Inglés, which raised its store in 1974 with nothing to indicate that this rectangle of Barcelona had been a hell with a woman's name. And here comes the most revealing detail of the whole report.

When in 2010 the Grup de Dones de Les Corts finally managed to put up a plaque, the text had to be agreed with the store's management. And the management asked that there be no political references. That the dictatorship not be mentioned. That what the place had been not be named. Anna Maria Batalla, daughter of one of the inmates, tells the story. The plaque ended up so antiseptic, so badly placed and so illegible that pedestrians walk past without noticing.

It took until December 2019 for a decent memorial (by the architect Jordi Henrich, the artist Núria Ricart and Hernández Holgado himself, pushed by the citizen platform Futur Monument) on the corner of Joan Güell and Europa. Notice the pattern, because it repeats all over Spain: the memory is never supplied by the company nor by the administration on its own initiative. It is wrenched out, over years, by the children and grandchildren and a handful of stubborn historians. The memorial, as those who built it put it, is the process. Which is to say: the fight.

Back to the beginning, to the window on Fontanella street, because now we know how to read it.

The El Corte Inglés on Plaça Catalunya opened in 1962 and grew at the expense of its block. The great 1990s expansion (whose authorship, and there is something close to farce here, was signed by none other than Oriol Bohigas, the architect-ideologue of Olympic Barcelona, with his MBM studio) required tearing down Casa Sicart, the Count of Sicart's modernist townhouse with Gallissà's gallery. The work finished in 1993 and was widely attacked for its grey bulk and for having devoured buildings of value at the most central point of the city.

The exact date of Casa Sicart's demolition varies by source (1987, 1990, 1991), and that imprecision is, in itself, fairly eloquent: we don't even bother to write down accurately when we kill things.

What remained is that gallery rebuilt from casts, nailed to the wall as a concession to conscience. The difference between restoring and embalming is the same as between caring for someone and stuffing them, and we Spaniards, where heritage is concerned, are a nation of taxidermists. We hang the pretty window on the store wall and tell ourselves we honoured history. That we honoured its display case.

Ask any urban planner today what the neighbourhood of the future looks like, and they will describe Pozas without knowing it: low traffic, clean air, children playing in the street, a school and every shop within a few minutes' walk, neighbours who know each other. Madrid had built exactly that in 1863, on a cheap triangular lot by the old San Bernardino gate, and then it knocked it down to put up a department store and a hotel.

The builder was named Ángel de Pozas y Cabarga, and he wanted, in his own words, to dignify Madrid's working class. He bought the plot precisely because its sharp triangular shape made it cheap and awkward, and on it the architect Cirilo Ulibarri laid out five blocks and three inner streets, Hermosa, Solares and the Valdecilla passage, around a small plaza. Buildings of four storeys with private bathrooms and sanitary standards unthinkable for nineteenth-century workers. Inside the triangle, nineteen residential blocks and a twentieth in the centre that held, at various times, a cultural centre, a button factory and whatever else was needed.

It worked. There was a market, a post office, a Civil Guard post, a school, taverns, craft workshops, even a school of arts and crafts. Madrid's first tram, in 1871, chose to link the Salamanca district and Pozas through the Puerta del Sol. Galdós and Baroja walked its streets. More than fifty films were shot there. By the 1875 census it had 1,588 inhabitants, a figure it more or less held until the end.

In 1955, at the height of Pozas's fame, the archaeologist Lauro Olmo Enciso was born on Hermosa street. His father was the playwright Lauro Olmo, author of La camisa; his mother, the writer Pilar Enciso. He was the last generation raised in those streets. The children, he remembers, almost lived in the street, because there were no cars and there was always a neighbour keeping an eye out; when you fell ill, someone would notice and send up a bowl of broth.

The broth stopped one morning in 1968, when the police arrived and began evicting people. First the old: an eviction order, five thousand pesetas in compensation, and a flat in a development that did not even belong to Madrid. The city council, with Arias Navarro at its head, had decided to demolish the whole neighbourhood, citing technical reports of imminent ruin that never appeared. The official College of Architects of Madrid sent its own surveyors and concluded there was no ruin of any kind, only some neglected facade rendering that could be fixed.

The excavator did not stop. In the thick of the desarrollismo, with the city overflowing and workers from the provinces crammed into shanty towns, Pozas was simply too good a lot for towers and shopping floors. The buildings fell one by one over four years, and every few days a fire broke out in the empty plots, which the neighbours read as pressure and the developer blamed on the local children. By 1971, only the Olmo family's block was left standing, at the height of what is now the El Corte Inglés furrier's department, one family holding out for a year in the middle of the rubble.

The playwright took it as a personal war. He buried the council in lawsuits and used his fame to fill front pages. On 11 February 1972, at nine in the morning, the excavator parked in front of the Olmo home. Every national outlet was there, and so were the BBC and Le Monde, which had sent correspondents to Madrid for the story. The chronicles say that the father, in desperation, ran out for paint and decorated his door in the colours of the Spanish flag, invoking a law that forbade defacing the national emblem. It did not work either. After four years, the family walked out past half past ten. A neighbourhood died that morning, and the photograph was on the front pages the next day.

Here is the part that should be carved over the entrance. Almost a decade later, when there was already an El Corte Inglés and a four-star hotel on top of his home, the Supreme Court ruled in Lauro Olmo's favour and declared the construction of the store illegal. The word is not ours, it is the court's: illegal. The compensation barely covered the family's legal costs, and the right of return was, of course, denied, because by then the lot was a very successful retail floor. The sentence arrived, as sentences in this story tend to, once there was nothing left to give back.

By now the pattern is exhausting, and that is the point. The same excavator reached Bilbao, where the El Corte Inglés on the Gran Vía went up over the Sagrado Corazón school, and a dozen other cities. But there is one Valencian case worth stopping on, because it spans the whole operation with a cynicism so complete it could be taught.

In 1970 El Corte Inglés bought the block on Colón street, in the centre of València, on Spain's eastern coast, with the convent of Santa Catalina de Siena inside it, and tore down nearly all of it. Nearly. The church, consecrated in 1543, they dismantled stone by stone and shipped out to Orriols, a neighbourhood on the city's edge, where they reassembled it on another lot like someone putting together a Lego set. You could say they deported it.

They ripped it out of four centuries of its own ground so the lot downtown would be free of obstructions, and could carry, on top, the set design of a Spain that already imagined itself different: the tourists' Spain first, and its ladies and gentlemen's after. It is the same logic as the Seville cheque taken to its physical extreme: heritage gets relocated wherever it won't bother business. And one should not hide behind the era, which is the usual alibi, the 'everyone did it' of the one who never pays. Because someone signed. Someone paid. Someone opened the till the next morning over the still-warm lot.

What binds Hemingway's hotel, the Seville palaces, the prison of the eighteen hundred women, a whole Madrid neighbourhood worn down house by house, the church dismantled and reassembled on the outskirts and the embalmed Barcelona window is not the architecture, which differed in every place. It looks like a precise calculation, repeated city after city, that the memory of a place does not appear on the balance sheet, does not trade, does not get in the way of a cash register if handled with sufficient coldness. A hotel is replaced. A palace is offset with a cheque. A women's prison is covered over with a plaque engraved so as not to offend. An entire neighbourhood is pulled down around the last family that refuses to leave. And a modernist house is reduced to a three-dimensional graffiti nailed to the scene of the crime.