The response did not take long. The Catalan Federation of Night Oci Locals (Fecalon) has already informed those responsible for Barcelona City Council that the vast majority of establishments will not be able to withstand the intense and forceful inspection campaign that the City Council has initiated with the new strategy. of multi-inspections that have already been carried out in very specific areas of the districts of Ciutat Vella and Sant Martí.
Fernando Martínez, lawyer and one of those responsible for Fecalon, has warned La Vanguardia that the sector feels once again “in the crosshairs” of the City Council. “We do not fully understand what this campaign of harassment and demolition against a sector that complies, that is safe and that is on the way to extermination if these actions continue.”
Martínez was referring specifically to the multi-inspection that the Barcelona City Council, based on the municipal management, organized on Thursday night and early Friday morning, in the so-called Gulf of Poblenou triangle, where around thirty public premises were audited.
Unlike the inspections that are already carried out from the district or from the central municipal services on a regular basis, on this occasion, there were more than a dozen inspectors and technicians of different modalities who knocked one by one on the doors of the premises selected.
An army of inspectors, as La Vanguardia defined them in its Sunday edition, which did not leave anyone indifferent. The delegation was also joined by inspectors from the Tax Agency who took a look at the documentation and analyzed the use of the dataphones to confirm that double accounting was not carried out.
“Nightlife in Sant Martí is experiencing a critical situation,” says Martínez. In recent years, explains the lawyer, around twenty venues have had to close their shutters and currently there are three nightclubs and fourteen music bars. And all concentrated in very few streets, those that make up the so-called gulf triangle, which upsets neighbors who, unlike the leisure sector, did applaud the heavy-handed policy in recent hours.
“What cannot be done is organize an inspection of these characteristics just before Christmas, which is when the sector can make money and recover the damage it still carries from the pandemic,” Martínez insists.
The Sant Martí operation culminated in 58 reports related to infractions and two precautionary closures of the activity, until the deficiencies in food safety identified by the technicians of the Barcelona Public Health Agency were corrected.