“Tonight we will continue together, but in Cornellà,” confirms Manuela, one of the last two people who have resisted inside El Barco de Esplugues de Llobregat, the building at risk of collapse evacuated on Monday while she was collecting her belongings. The other person who slept there tonight is one of her children, Juanma.
What until now was Manuela Sánchez’s home has a small garden. “I told the mayor that we needed three days to collect,” she explains between tools. She has rented a warehouse from a Cornellà fruit seller so she can leave everything.
“Life has treated me very badly,” he says. He cries when she remembers when one of her children died two years ago from an aggressive tumor. “But this situation has been even more painful,” she notes. She has been living in El Barco for 40 years. He has enormous roots in it. “Things are not done that way. We have had a lot of pressure to go out,” she says. “I’ve asked for a psychologist,” she says.
The people who have refused to leave El Barco during the last few hours are part of the same family, but they each lived in their own apartment. “We have been together and we are also going out together,” says Manuela while Saray, her daughter-in-law, helped her pick up.
Thus, this Thursday there will be no one left in El Barco and the shoring work on the building can begin. They will last about 15 days and will allow the neighbors, who paid their rent to the City Council, to collect all their things. Filling a suitcase with clothes is not the same as taking out a bed.
On the other hand, the Esplugues City Council has confirmed that none of the 38 affected families spent the last night in a hostel in Barcelona. All those who have not turned to their family network have been relocated to hotels or aparthotels.
