Avant-garde architecture in provincial healthcare. The implementation of the National Health System in Zamora

Abstract

If we want to understand the history of architecture in Spain more clearly, it is essential to look at healthcare facilities built in the provinces during the second half of the 20th century. Many of these hospitals, planned for integrated healthcare, were extraordinarily important in the administration of the nation’s provinces, being generally built in provincial capitals to provide healthcare for the residents of each territory. With this model, the Compulsory Health Insurance system wanted to guarantee universal coverage for its members and, at the same time, make these centres exemplary providers of both healthcare and architecture for the whole province, separate to those run by the Provincial Councils. It also tried to bring healthcare closer to areas furthest away from the centres of research and development of Spanish medicine and science established in the main cities, and especially to the less developed regions. We look more closely at this idea by studying the case of Zamora, and the process of creating its hospital. We take this city as an example of similar circumstances occurring in many other provinces of inland Spain, where from the 50s to the 70s the situation was very different to the current case of depopulation. We have looked at primary sources such as documentation produced by government ministries and the local administrations themselves, correspondence generated during the process, and the hospital’s architectural plans. All this has highlighted the extraordinary endowment these facilities received, and the contribution they made to the universal availability of health and medicine in Spain.