Neighbors and merchants on Consell de Cent street and surrounding areas, in the section of the Fort Pienc neighborhood, far beyond the central and bucolic Superblock of Barcelona’s Eixample, are fed up with the smoke, noise, heat, stumbling blocks and other inconveniences that This summer they bring you buses loaded with tourists willing to take a look at the facades of the Sagrada Família temple.
Because the damned buses come and go all the time, all day long, so many that at times they don’t find a free space and double park. And in its wake a lot of floors vibrate, and a disturbing background hum settles in your ears and drowns out the television, and also the temperature rises… and in the end all this puts you in a very bad mood.
“Yes, this background noise ends up getting on your nerves,” says the manager of a bicycle rental shop, pointing to three buses parked in front of his business, visibly fed up with the situation. They leave the tourists and remain standing there for a few minutes, which the guards leave for them, most of them with the engine running, to maintain the air conditioning, and then they leave…”.
“And immediately another bus takes its place –another merchant intervenes, also visibly fed up with the situation–, and shortly after the previous one returns for his group, because tourists always return immediately, because most of them do not enter the temple, they simply photograph it and they come back… and that’s how we spend the day, in a loop of buses, one after the other, the traffic is non-stop, and on cruise days you hallucinate colors! is that they put them here with a shoehorn, the buses. When they were at Diagonal avenue, further down Diagonal avenue, they had more space, but now here they are all crowded together and…”.
It has been more or less a year since the works to join the two tram lines made it necessary to move the car parks arranged for these vehicles in the vicinity of the Diagonal. In the neighborhood association of Fort Pienc they detail that the inconvenience increased little by little, that for weeks now the enabled corners seem completely insufficient, that the number of cruise passengers that swarm its streets does not stop growing… Perhaps the municipal management of these flows was somewhat improvised.
There were once 12 parking spaces on the Diagonal, and at the moment there are nine in Consell de Cent and surroundings. “And they weren’t so close to the houses, the ones on Diagonal – they abound in the neighborhood association. We calculate that about a hundred coaches arrive every day, and the days when cruise ships stop in the city, which are not few, since there are already more than 150, and smoke, noise and heat are not the only problems. How many people fit in a bus, 50, 60…? We are talking about continuous human floods, huge groups, all the time taking over some very narrow sidewalks. At least the City Council could put some civic agents!”.
“They are like the bunnies in the advert with the batteries, the cruise passengers, the foreigners on the buses,” a neighborhood merchant put in, “they travel a lot and spend little! because maybe they can buy a magnet from the Sagrada Família a little higher up, but around here…”. “Yes,” they add in a bar, “here they don’t even drink a Coca Cola, the only thing they ask you to do is go to the bathroom, all the time, one after the other, 15, 20 in one morning, what do I know… and I already ask them for a euro, because it is not a plan either, and then they prefer to put up with it ”. “They also ask me to go to the bathroom all the time –says another shopkeeper-, a lot of times a day, and I feel bad saying no, but I have a normal shop! It’s the bathroom of the store…”. “The City Council could put a few portable toilets in the street.”
“We have been complaining for weeks – they resume in Fort Pienc -. We and the Sagrada Família residents’ association–, but for now the City Council ignores us. Will Consell de Cent be the final location for the buses? They told us that it would be temporary. When the tram works are finished, the buses will be able to return to the Diagonal? it seems not to us. If the tram, a new bike lane, wider sidewalks have to run on the avenue, where are they going to put the buses?
No, municipal sources confirm that the buses will not return to the surroundings of the Diagonal, that the spaces provided in Consell de Cent and surrounding areas are final, that they will try to alleviate all these neighborhood inconveniences by setting up at least four new parking lots in front of the bullring of the Monumental. “In this way we will have one more square than there were around the Diagonal, we will reduce the problems of Consell de Cent and we will also open a new itinerary to the temple with much wider sidewalks. In addition, no one lives in the Monumental. The truth is that the number of possible locations for the buses in this part of the city is very low”.
The municipal forecasts do not unleash enthusiasm in the surroundings of the Sagrada Família. The floods will continue up and down the street, and they understand that the number of parking spaces will continue to be insufficient. “Man, that’s good news,” they say in the neighborhood association of this neighborhood. At least they start to pay us a little attention. The associations proposed to open new squares in front of the Monumental”. What happens is that four parking lots does not seem like they can mark a great turning point.
In the Sagrada Família association they say that the solution is difficult, but that perhaps as palliative care they could try to soften the problem by setting up more well-dispersed car parks, fleeing the concentrations and the most populated streets. “The impact on neighborhood life would be less and tourists could become visitors and get to know our neighborhood, and not take a photo and leave. People here have been fed up with so much mass tourism, for a long time, and now even more so, because many thought that with the pandemic we might learn something, but at the moment of truth, everything remains the same, perhaps worse, more and more are coming people! and so no…”. It’s been a long time since dragging the shopping cart here became a very complicated business.
And guides, drivers and tourists are not happy either. “We understand the neighbors, their complaints,” say the APIT, the Professional Association of Tourist Interpreters, one of the main groups of lifelong guides. But it is that each time they take us further away from the places of interest, they make it more and more difficult for us and the drivers to do our job, which is why the atmosphere becomes rarer! In the surroundings of the Sagrada Família sometimes they shoot pellets against the buses! We believe that always from the same place… and many of our clients are older people and people with mobility problems, they can’t walk as much! some do not have a good time with so many walks and complain. If they brought us a little closer to the places of interest and provided us with more access routes, we would not bother the neighbors so much and we would provide a better service. People from all over the world want to see the Sagrada Família temple, and also many other corners of Barcelona”.
