I wanted to show the City Council that everything remains the same here, that nothing has changed in the neighborhood, that the billboards they put up are of no use, that as many people continue to come to the Carmel bunkers as before or more, that living in this neighborhood is no longer It is not what it was, not at all, that we are completely saturated, that…
This is how Joan’s story begins, of the 76-year-old resident of Carmel who was beaten up last week, after recording with his mobile phone and drawing the attention of a group of visitors who were preparing to jump over the fences set up at the beginning of May to mitigate the tourist mass of this place. And, on top of that, when they had him on the ground, they went and stole his device, an iPhone 14. Several dozen people braved the heat yesterday and gathered in the Juan Ponce gardens to express their discomfort.
“I should have started recording inside the house, secretly, and not from the street, in full view of everyone, but… Before the elections we had urban guards here every day, a few meters from my house, I saw them all the time, and now, on the other hand…”. Joan has always lived in the remote Marià Labèrnia street, the main access road to the highly saturated bunkers, a steep street lined with small houses that always seemed like a village, but which for some time now has become a surreal scene! hundreds of foreigners go up and down here every day!
“They hit me again about two or three years ago,” Joan recalls. That time it was early in the morning. A guy was peeing outside my house, drunk, and I asked him what the hell he was doing, and he said fuck me in English, fuck you, just like that, and he punched me right in the face, and like I was wearing a ring, they had to put eleven stitches in my mouth.” The government of the mayoress Ada Colau, here in the Horta-Guinardó district represented by the socialist mayor Rosa Alarcón, understood that good billboards closed every day at half past seven and other measures would contribute to mitigating the overcrowding of the viewpoint, a saturation that has already altered the daily life of the neighborhood, which has people rather fed up.
“But as many people continue to come to the bunkers as before,” Joan continues, “and those who want to jump over the fence, especially now, since the municipal elections here we no longer see the Urban Police as we did before… it’s that the other day they were jumping the fence like 50 or 60 people at the same time! Perhaps if the fences were a tad higher… And other visitors, when the fences are closed, well, they disperse around the surroundings, with their chips and their cans of beer, because the Turó de la Rovira is not the only viewpoint in the area. Here people have the feeling that a symbol has been taken from them.
“Then they tell me that Dominicans don’t like to be filmed, and before I realize it, I have fifteen people around me,” Joan continues, now showing some of her bruises, “and one of them hit me in the chest. that knocked me down on the ground, and then others took advantage and kicked me all over the place and a woman took my phone! If the security device of the Urban Guard had been where she was for so many days before, none of this would have happened ”.
The next day Joan bought another device, but when it was time to recover her files she found that they had already deleted the video that could give them away. “This time they weren’t foreigners, they weren’t tourists, because the truth is that all kinds of people come here… the locator says that the phone is in Can Barók, one block from Francesc Alegre street… but come on The truth is that the Mossos d’Esquadra aren’t paying much attention to me either”.
