I am going to talk mainly about Valencia, although the observation that I am sharing with you can be adapted to other cities. In fact, years ago I saw the same thing happen in Barcelona, ??the capital where I trained and where I usually go from time to time for professional and personal reasons. What I want to tell you is that, sometimes, when I walk through the center of my city, I feel strange, almost foreign. Not so much for the fact of seeing how tourists have occupied all those spaces that were previously part of my human geography; The problem is that what existed in those same spaces has disappeared. Restaurants, bars or shops that were my sentimental reference and that have been devoured by the same brands or franchises that I find in any center of any city in Europe. Or also replaced by those businesses that sell you tiny bulls and bullfighters, plastic castanets or Barça or Real Madrid t-shirts; and that the youngest visitors acquire while taking a selfie.
The Valencia that for decades enveloped me in afternoons of uncertainty and nights of games of seduction, in long gatherings seasoned with its own and imported wines, has changed too much. But I still have memory; I am still able to make a long list of the spaces that tourism has converted into theme parks, with similar, or almost the same, attractions as in other latitudes. With the proven inability of the administrations to bring order to a growing chaos: Rita Barberá did not achieve it when the problem began, the left did not achieve it in eight years of government and I have reasonable doubts that the right will achieve it. Because the trend, which shows the worst side of savage capitalism, seems unstoppable, as can be seen in those almost mythical cities like Barcelona, ??Amsterdam or Rome that have been swallowed up by low cost, rental apartments and trolls hitting the road. , with a sound that has expanded its radius of action, reaching many neighborhoods in Valencia, from Benimaclet to Russafa to Patraix.
I admit it, I no longer know certain corners of my city, or I could say more rigorously that they are no longer my own. But I’m also starting to lose the people who motivated me to go to those places. You know, the rental prices, sales prices and things like that, and those vulture funds or investors who are taking over the city, my city. Provoking that many men and women prefer to live away from Valencia, because like me they feel that every day Valencia belongs to them a little less. The amazing thing is that it seems that this is accepted with a pathological conformism, from the hypothesis that what happens is normal, necessary and also enriches us. Without verifying that in other cities the phenomenon has pushed them into the abyss. We are going the same way.
