On August 8, 1936, late at night, a mob damaged the niche of Sant Roc de la Plaça Nova and destroyed the image. The pieces were collected and kept by a neighbor. That year, although everything was ready and the poster of the feast was almost finished, the feast was not celebrated. Civil War had broken out less than a month ago and the city lived with uncertainty the different events that happened. The neighborhood lived for three years a new and tragic epidemic; war. However, the Feast Committee did not ever dissolve.
On Sunday 30th of January 1938, at half past eight in the morning, a squadron of the legionary Italian aviation, ally of Franco's army, bombarded the city. The bombing dramatically affected the Cathedral Quarter. Buildings collapsed or were damaged in the Plaça Nova and Sant Felip Neri squares, the streets de la Corríbia, del Bou de la plaça Nova, dels Capellans, dels Sagristans, dels Arcs, de la Palla... At eleven in the morning, a second and criminal bombing afflicted the neighborhood again, and even affected the health and emergency services who had come to help the wounded. The bombs left two hundred dead neighbors and seventy-five wounded. More than twenty buildings were destroyed or seriously affected.
With the end of the war and once the new regime of dictator General Franco was established, in the same year 1939, the feast were celebrated again with its more traditional events, and obviously, the religious ones. The Feast Committee was not yet aware, as well as most of the population, of the scope of the fascist victory and its consequences. That year for Sant Roc, in addition to the logic and solemn restitution of the image of the saint, Sardana dances were performed for the first time in the city after the war. The Sardana dances were followed by stick dances by some Falangist indivuduals.
During the early years of Franco's rule the celebration ran between censorship and control of all the events by the authorities of the regime, hunger and misery of many residents and the predominant presence of the religious acts. However, the members of the Feast Committee that remained alive and in the neighborhood did their best to keep the spirit and the catalanity of the feast with the entourage, the Sardanes and traditional dances.
In 1940 the new municipal authorities under Franco, taking advantage of the effects of the bombing in 1938, rescued the old project of interior reform plans to demolish the buildings and open the projected C. Avenue. What would become the Avenue of the Cathedral wiped away the streets de la Corríbia, del Bou de la plaça Nova and de Sallent and transformed the streets de la Palla, dels Arcs, dels Boters, dels Capellans and dels Sagristans.
