A twenty-something Italian woman says at the door of number 12 on Ronda Sant Pau in Barcelona that she will only spend a month on the property, that she is in Barcelona doing a kind of seminar, that they pay about a thousand euros a month for the apartment… “But that My roommate wears it. I have to go, sorry, I have an online class.”
That block of large luxury homes of more than 200 m2, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms each, some even equipped with a jacuzzi, which became a disturbing ghost building, finally has tenants, legal tenants, clothes hanging on the balconies and names in mailboxes after more than 30 years uninhabited! Here, in a super-central and truly privileged location, where finding an apartment is a hero’s undertaking, between the neighborhoods of Raval, Sant Antoni and Poble Sec.
“Yes, people have lived in this building for a few months now,” says the woman who comes every week to clean the common areas of the property, “but I don’t know about anyone in particular, a lot of students come, I think they are students, because They do vacation or seasonal rentals or whatever they call it.”
We are also in front of a whole symbol. The government of then-mayor Ada Colau announced in 2016 that it would fine the owners of this five-story building for keeping it empty for so many years, for breaking the Housing Law. That fine could reach half a million euros. But then the City Council could not process the sanction because, among other circumstances, the apartments in question were not registered as housing. Colau’s team also considered that the City Council buy the property to use it for social rental, but that initiative did not prosper either.
“Indeed,” recalls a commercial for this building, “some apartments are rented by months. We had to renovate a good part of the homes and convert them into apartments of about 60 m2, dividing each of those large apartments into three. The problem is that they were very big houses, too big. There are still a couple of 200 m2 apartments that will be renovated in a second phase, those on the first two floors, but those on the remaining three floors are divided and have tenants since this summer.” Five years ago, the possibility of setting up a hotel or tourist apartments was also considered, but those plans did not come to fruition either.
In addition, the farm was busy for a good season. She was taken by very alternative activists from the Poble Sec neighborhood during their mourning for the death of a colleague named Pablo Molano. Molano was a very close friend of Colau herself before he entered more conventional politics.
The history of La Rimaia as a squatter center was rather brief, just a few months, but then this usurpation was held up by many as a symbol of the fight against real estate speculation. The farm then welcomed some families. In those times, Barcelona City Council exuded an intense squatter-friendly feeling. Colau and his people were not happy when they vacated La Rimaia.
Then, after the corresponding eviction, with the aim of stopping new occupations, for a long period, an employee spent hours wearing a reflective vest sitting on a beach chair planted in the middle of the sidewalk, between Ronda Sant Pau and Paral·lel avenue. One didn’t know if that was the best or the worst job in the world.