This week we have a neighborhood meeting at petanque, and then we will see, they say around here, in the Carmel neighborhood, with furrowed brows. “But, come on, we will continue with the demonstrations on Friday afternoon anyway – add others, very angry -. This will not stay like this, in any way”.
Mayor Ada Colau’s government reported yesterday that the fences of the Carmel bunkers are almost complete, that from the 2nd the Turó de la Rovira viewpoint will be closed to the public from half past eight in the evening until nine in the morning, and after the summer from half past six in the afternoon. So, you can now say goodbye to those known in the four corners of the planet as the best sunsets in Barcelona. The fence doesn’t exactly seem impenetrable, although the special device of the Urban Guard will be very attentive.
The truth is that this municipal measure intended to put an end to the tremendous crowds of tourists that for years have been generating a lot of everyday problems that are getting more and more internal in this part of Barcelona are triggering the indignation of a large part of the residents of these streets so steep Many feel that the City Council’s initiative does nothing other than complete their expulsion from a place they still feel is their own.
And some believe that we are dealing with another manifestation of a city problem and that everyone should work together with the residents of other areas also affected in order to deal with an overcrowding of tourists that this summer may reach records never before seen in Barcelona, ​​and others think that it is not appropriate to get lost among chimerical anti-system objectives and that it is most convenient to focus on the neighborhood and its traffic, to try to recover some bunkers that were demolished many years ago.
The councilor responsible for the district of Horta Guinardó, the socialist Rosa Alarcón, detailed that this is a medium-term measure to transform the uses of the space, to attract a public more interested in the history of this enclave than not in the revelry at sunset. But these changes don’t happen overnight. The councilor recalled that the fence of the bunkers began to be assembled in 2019, but that the pandemic and some problems with the tender delayed its launch. Municipal technicians will install some informational posters these days. And the special device of the Urban Guard will make sure that the agglomerations of guiris and especially their parties do not spread around the area. “Tourism is beneficial, but it must be governed – the councilor postulated. It’s been weeks since we put an end to illegal parties. Step by step”.
“The City Council assures that some entities in the neighborhood are in favor of the fence – says Montse Montero, from the Carmel neighborhood association – but most of the people are against it, and this way it will be seen as the news spread through the neighborhood. We are not against tourists, at least not all of them… What happens is that many residents feel that the massification of visitors robbed them of something that belonged to them, their bunkers. We have been warning for years that Carmel was not ready for the arrival of so many tourists, and they never did anything to prepare it. And now they go and close the bunkers?, maybe it’s already too late”.
“It’s just that we go up there and they just need to throw peanuts at us – Fran Bernal, from the Neighborhood Council of Turó de la Rovira, added in disgust. Look, a lot of people from the surrounding area always came here to be with the girlfriend, with friends, to hang out, look for snails, pick prickly pears, make a Xibeca… and people also came to do other more questionable things, why should we deceive ourselves… but all this and the viewpoint were part of the life of the Carmel neighborhood… Until it began to disappear, little by little, as this place became fashionable for this and that. And during the pandemic people took advantage of it and recovered the lookout, and they brought the creatures back to the bunkers, after years without going near them. But that was a very brief mirage. Yes, the decentralization of tourism was started by mayor Trias, but for eight years the governments of communes and socialists have done nothing! And now our bunkers are being closed… People will not take it well at all. But this is not a problem exclusively for Carmel, but for the city of Barcelona. What is happening here is a great demonstration.”
