“Let’s see,” said a neighbor to the dj immersed in his mixes, setting them up with his laptop, “either you remove the music or we remove it…”. And meanwhile hundreds of people jumping at full speed, in front of the best postcard of Barcelona, ??between the bunkers of Carmel, at the top of Turó de la Rovira… In the end it was a couple of neighbors from the surroundings up to their noses who this Sunday they aborted the last illegal party on this mountain. Then the Urban Guard dispersed the idlers.
Colored lights, ten-euro long drinks, powerful sound equipment… For some time now those impromptu picnics and more or less spontaneous bottles during twilight gave way to organized illegal parties aimed mainly at making money. So many people come here to see the sunset… And lately a couple of groups of half a dozen residents of the area each stand at the accesses?to the place to tell the foreigners that they go up so happy?that they think that all these little houses live people.
“We suffered an invasion of drunken foreigners”, detail these neighbors. “Some call the houses at dawn, and ask you for ice, condoms, charge the mobile”. “And they also yell at any time, pee in the gardens of the houses, they get cool…”. “From time to time there are attacks. They have no respect for us.” “Sometimes a neighbor wanted to tell them enough is enough and…”. “And then there are the mobility problems, from so many cars that go up.” “The buses are overcrowded.” “The situation is unsustainable, the overcrowding is total.” “The party thing is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” A decade ago, the movie Tengo ganas de ti made this place fashionable, and since then its number of visitors has only grown. Previously, this viewpoint was a hidden place where motorcycle thieves mainly went looking for a quiet place to scrap them.
The councilor responsible for the Horta-Guinardó district, the socialist Rosa Alarcón, says that the fences that will block the way to the bunkers at night will be ready on April 28. These facilities had to be up a year ago, but a problem with the successful bidder forced the tender to restart. “We also hope that by then we will have completed a museumization of the place, to preserve the memory of the barracks, the Iberian settlement and the anti-aircraft batteries.”
The mayor Alarcón recognizes that the neighbors who complain are right. “That is why we are a couple of weeks ahead of the implementation of the special device of the Urban Police, originally scheduled for these days. Now we have two commanders and ten agents”. In fact, the presence of the municipal police prevented the sarao promoted on Tik Tok from starting at the scheduled time, at six in the afternoon. The professional partygoers waited for the agents to leave, around nine o’clock at night, to take out their speakers. The policemen returned an hour later… “This weekend we will be very attentive. In addition, we will restrict the passage of vehicles. We want to recover this space. We are also working with Turisme de Barcelona to remove it from the guides, so that it is not promoted so much”. Yes, these parties are really the result of unbridled popularization.
The neighbours, however, increasingly organized and fed up, do not trust them, they fear that these professional party-goers will look for other enclaves in the area. “In recent months things have gotten out of hand,” they stress in the Turó de la Rovira neighborhood associations. What happens is that we live in a dismembered neighborhood, with a lot of urban affectations for decades. We lack a true neighborhood plan. For many years everything here seems very provisional”.
