Barcelona will get rid of the last traces of the pandemic in its streets in a few weeks. The government of Mayor Ada Colau is confident that the last concrete barriers called New Jersey will be removed by the end of April. Then the City Council will have concluded the very cumbersome administrative process aimed at determining how many of the tables and chairs authorized in an extraordinary way to compensate for the restrictions and new customs that the virus broke out would continue to function permanently. Very few expected that ordering all this would be so complex. Only not getting lost among the numbers attests to this. The plan was to start retiring the New Jerseys in mid-2022.
In mid-2020, the City Council implemented 3,668 exceptional terraces, of which 1,550 were located in parking lots, traffic lanes, chamfers… At the end of 2019, Barcelona had issued 5,704 terrace licenses that totaled some 25,800 tables. Right now we are talking about 6,375 permits and 29,800 tables. Municipal sources clarify that of the 671 new licenses, 474 were exceptional authorizations derived from the pandemic and 197 responded to ordinary requests. The City Council also authorized 657 expansions of terraces that were already in operation. Between new terraces and consolidated extensions, the city will maintain 1,131. In the end, the Barcelona restaurateurs will add some 4,000 more tables than when the pandemic struck. Most of them, all those planted on the roads, will remain in decent modules approved by the Consistory.
The City Council has already removed 2,325 New Jersey and 5,550 Sevillanas used to flank these nightstands. The sources also ensure that the City Council dismantled nine out of ten provisional terraces.
The Town Planning lieutenant, Janet Sanz, was pleased yesterday that Barcelona has returned to normality, improving the situation for pedestrians, freeing up public space, she added. Most of the consolidated extraordinary terraces are installed on asphalt. In this way, Barcelona will finally free itself from these airs of a city plunged into a war, of an unprecedented provisionality. Anyone who has traveled in recent months, who has been to Madrid, Bilbao, Seville, Granada, Palma or other cities where nightstands also proliferate, will have verified that the situation in Barcelona became disturbingly particular, that the pandemic stayed there a long time ago above all the memory, that they returned to normal long before.
Perhaps in these latitudes the tug of war starring the restaurant lobby and entities that see the terraces as a source of discomfort. These conflicts manifest themselves mainly in the Ciutat Vella and Eixample districts. The deputy mayor for Urban Planning also assured that the municipal criteria in this regard was always the same, the municipal ordinance on terraces. But it is also true that even with the mask on all the time, the Colau government proclaimed bluntly that the new terraces planted on the roads came to Barcelona to stay, and that later, as the city recovered its pulse and therefore their old problems, the position of the municipal executive seemed stricter. In fact, the same Restoration Association, which a few months ago angrily denounced a massive denial of renewal applications, celebrated yesterday that “common sense” finally prevails.
The delay in the final withdrawal of the New Jersey with respect to municipal forecasts is largely due to the fact that the City Council did not gauge the true magnitude of the administrative work involved. In addition, not a few restaurateurs responded with a multitude of allegations to many of the refusals issued by the City Council in Ciutat Vella and the Eixample, an extreme that did nothing but slow down this process even more.
