The government of Mayor Ada Colau is drawing up an emergency plan to stop the exasperating overcrowding of the Carmel bunkers. Agents of the Urban Police seized this weekend a few loudspeakers and colored lights, and in this way they aborted a couple of clandestine parties, and late Sunday afternoon they evicted nearly a thousand people concentrated in the place . Unfortunately, police action is nothing more than hot cloths.
The young visitors then moved to other points in Turó de la Rovira. Many residents of the surrounding area are fed up with the shouting, the rubbish, the mobility problems… Their videos and photographs attest to how their streets became an improvised passageway for thousands of tourists, a trail of people equipped with beer cans, wine bottles, even red and white checkered tablecloths…
“Despite the fact that in May the fences will be prepared to close the place at night – details the councilor responsible for the Horta-Guinardò district, the socialist Rosa Alarcón -, this special device of two commanders and ten agents of the Urban Police, more than double that of the previous one, it will be maintained every weekend at least until October. We are reinforcing it with auxiliary personnel in charge of facilitating traffic. The City Council will finance everything with the income from the tourist tax. In addition, this weekend the device had the support of the Urep, of the Reinforcement Unit for Emergencies and Proximityâ€.
In any case, as Councilor Alarcón herself acknowledges, the police reinforcements are nothing more than palliative measures aimed mainly at mitigating the growing neighborhood unrest in the short term, to prevent this mass from becoming even more rampant this summer. “To reverse this situation we also have to work in the medium and long term – the mayor abounds -. We have to change the visitors, remove the Carmel bunkers from the tourist guides, stop promoting it as the ideal viewpoint and only emphasize its historical character. In this sense, its imminent musealization must play a key role. We will make sure that neither films nor commercials are recorded here again, perhaps some historical documentaryâ€.
The problem is that right now, at this point, social media is a very difficult force to counter. On Twitter, on Instagram and especially on Tik Tok, this emblematic viewpoint is continually presented as one of the best places in the world to go on a truly alternative party. Who the hell wants to go to a club of a lifetime when they can…? The message that goes around the planet is that if you come to Barcelona you can’t miss the Carmel soirees. The monster has long since gotten out of hand. It all started about ten years ago. These people don’t have the remotest idea who Pijoaparte is.
“We are very satisfied with the work of the agents of the Urban Guard,” say a few residents of the surroundings. The problem is that the traffic restrictions do not stop workingâ€. “The buses are going up to the tops – detail others -. In fact, many residents of the neighborhood prefer not to go near them at certain times. And also a lot of taxis and VTCs arrive continuously. They have to put up pylons that close off the neighborhood every day, and not just on weekends.†“The City Council is now in a great hurry to do what it did not do for so many years.”
“We are not against tourism, but against mass tourism. In the morning many people come to visit the bunkers, and nothing happens, that’s what they’re for, the bunkers, that’s what the viewpoint is for… they’re polite and they respect us!†“But in the afternoon everything gets out of hand. If they are evicted from one point they move to another. And what can you do…”. “At six in the morning the cleaning crews come and they have to go up and down five or six times from all the rubbish they find.” “Fencing off the viewpoint and closing it at night will only transfer the problems, it will be of no use.” “We’ll see these days, we’ll see this summer.”
