Cambrils seafront, on the border with Salou, in the heart of the Costa Daurada, around two in the afternoon yesterday. More than eighty top manta vendors on almost the same stretch of promenade that a week ago the City Council blocked the passage of people with the New Jersey sign, for five days in a row, to disperse the manteros. The plan of the local executive (PSC, ERC, JxC and En Comú Podem) is to periodically repeat the cuts with the concrete blocks with “the objective of gradually removing” the illegal sellers from this point, considered critical.
Hundreds of t-shirts, bags, sneakers and other items of clothing and accessories displayed on the ground, a few meters from the beach, between terraces and near the beach bars. The New Jersey ones, temporarily set aside, served yesterday to seat some vendors. Coming and going of curious people and buyers, the vast majority of them tourists. Seen what we have seen for almost an hour, there are no problems of coexistence on public roads, with normal movement of people on the part of the sidewalk free of blankets and also on the bike lane.
In a section of half a kilometer, in the municipality of Cambrils but just before reaching Salou, vendors turn the walk into a kind of open-air bazaar. They do it daily, especially when the weekend and the thick of the tourist season arrive. It is not new: the business has been going on for more than two decades and there have been many attempts to dissuade manteros at this point.
The strategy of temporarily cutting off all circulation on this stretch of walk seems to have borne little fruit. The manteros persist despite the efforts of the City Council to remove them without resorting to police intervention on public roads, ruled out due to the risk of strong riots.
“There are fewer manteros, about eighty; There were more than 150. And now they take up less space on the promenade; They even occupied 700 meters of promenade,” local government sources say. The Cambrils City Council is convinced that it will end up paying off thanks to persistence “because the manteros have seen that things are serious.”
Among the changes that have been observed – the first cut lasted from Friday of last week until last Tuesday – that the manteros are placed more orderly without invading the space reserved for the terraces and leaving 75% of the walk free, they say municipal sources. The residents of the area applaud the measure because they claim to be tired of enduring the inconvenience and coexistence problems caused by the top manta for four decades. From the Cap Sant Pere Veïns Association they ask that the New Jersey “not be occasional”, despite the inconvenience caused to neighbors and tourists by having the walk closed.
The Cambrilsha City Council spoke with the manteros and has offered them an alternative place, outside the promenade, but has received refusals because the place is ideal for selling, very consolidated after so many years. The municipal government maintains that the top manta area harms the merchants and businesses of Salou the most due to its proximity to the urban center, which is why it asks its neighbors for collaboration.
Curiously, on the entire promenade of Salou, adjacent to that of Cambrils, it is impossible to find a mantero selling. “There has been no top manta in Salou for years, it is non-existent,” corroborates Marçal Curto, its Councilor for Citizen Security.