

Homage from Catalonia ... Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

Last week a Spanish pressure group claimed its government was infringing civil rights by putting more security cameras in public areas, especially motorways. The Association for the Defence of Fundamental Rights demanded they should be suspended while the Orwellian horror of the surveillance society is debated.

Quite what George Orwell himself would have made of it we will never know. But the writer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the satire featuring the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, might perhaps have been amused to discover a security camera keeping watch over a plaza in Barcelona that bears his name.

The camera monitors any ne'er-do-wells in this rundown square in the inner-city Ciutat Vella area. Any Orwell pilgrims paying the plaza a visit might be a little disappointed. Instead of an imposing statue of a 20th-century literary giant, this rather down-at-heel square contains an odd-looking metal sculpture by Spanish surrealist Leandre Cristofol. The square was named after Orwell not because of his literary endeavours, but because he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war.

In 1936, he arrived in Spain to fight as part of the International Brigade in the doomed effort to defeat Franco's nationalists. He survived a bullet in the neck before going on to detail the vicious infighting among leftwing factions in Homage to Catalonia. Sixty years later, in 1996, residents of Ciutat Vella marked the anniversary by naming the square after him.

Ciutat Vella contains some of the most popular areas for tourists in the city, so is a magnet for bag thieves. In an effort to crack down on these street robberies, cameras were installed a few years ago.

Security cameras are steadily spreading through Spain, particularly in larger cities. But the irony of placing a camera in a square named after Orwell appears to be lost on the local council. "This is a public place independent of the name of the plaza. The camera is there to ensure the security of the individual, not as a measure of repression," says Jaume Cusco, a Barcelona city council spokesman.