This Thursday, early in the morning, the Barcelona Urban Guard began the eviction of the municipal building located in the Plaza de la Garduña in Ciutat Vella, which in recent years housed a profile of squatters whose vast majority were dedicated mainly to crime in the neighborhood. The device, planned with discretion and with a court order, has the operational support of the Mossos d’Esquadra and the National Police. The space is municipally owned and for years it has focused complaints from neighbors and merchants tired of suffering the consequences of incivility and the events carried out by this profile of squatters.
The device has forced some of the roads leading to the Boquería market to be cut off to traffic. The judicial eviction order warns of the “strong deficiencies in security, health and many complaints about incidents” caused by the space and the tenants, as explained by the Urban Police in its official X account.
The space, the old Massana school, is inhabited intermittently by up to fifty people, the vast majority of whom are migrants. The social movement that has managed the building in recent years warns that inside there are also assistance services for tenants and specific users of the space. On numerous occasions, police chases carried out by both urban guards and the Ciutat Vella police ended in that space, where thieves who had warned red-handed and entered the space to hide quickly entered.
Several groups and entities in Raval have denounced the eviction and have asked for support to stop it. “The City Council is carrying out an eviction without mediation or even complying with the administrative route,” criticizes Supor Mutu Laboral Ciutat Vella. Last November there was already an attempted eviction in Antiga Massana. In the previous legislature, the squatters asked the then mayor Ada Colau to grant the building a concession for half a century, although without success.