The answer did not take long to arrive. The Catalan Federation of Nightlife Venues (Fecalon) has already informed Barcelona City Council officials that the vast majority of establishments cannot withstand the intense and forceful inspection campaign that the Council has started with the new multi-inspection strategy, which have already been carried out in very specific areas of the Ciutat Vella and Sant Martí districts.
Fernando Martínez, lawyer and one of the people responsible for Fecalon, warned La Vanguardia yesterday that the sector is once again “in the spotlight” of the City Council. “We don’t quite understand what this campaign of systematic harassment against a sector that complies, that is safe and that is on the way to its extermination if they continue these actions.”
Martínez was specifically referring to the multi-inspection that the Barcelona City Council, based on the municipal management, organized on Thursday night and Friday morning, in the so-called Gulf triangle of Poblenou, where thirty competition premises were audited public
Unlike the inspections that are already carried out from the district or from the municipal central services on a regular basis, this time it was more than a dozen inspectors and technicians of different modalities who knocked one by one on the doors of the selected premises.
An army of inspectors, as La Vanguardia defined them in its Sunday edition, which did not leave anyone indifferent. Inspectors from the Tax Agency were also added to the entourage who took a look at the documentation and analyzed the use of dataphones to confirm that there was no double accounting.
“Nighttime leisure in Sant Martí is experiencing a critical situation”, assured Martínez. In recent years, the lawyer explained, around twenty venues have had to close the shutters and currently there are three nightclubs and fourteen music bars. And all concentrated in very few streets, which make up the so-called Gulfo triangle, which upsets some residents who, unlike the leisure sector, have applauded the hard-line policy in recent hours.
“What cannot be done is to organize an inspection of these characteristics on the eve of Christmas, which is when the sector can cash out and recover the damage it is still suffering from the pandemic”, Martínez insisted.
The operation in Sant Martí culminated in 58 acts related to infringements and two precautionary closures of the activity, until the deficiencies in food safety identified by the technicians of the Public Health Agency of Barcelona were resolved.