Barcelona will rid itself of the last traces of the pandemic in the streets in a few weeks. Mayor Ada Colau’s government is confident that the last concrete barriers called New Jersey will be removed by the end of April. The City Council will then have concluded the very confusing administrative process intended to determine how many of the tables and chairs authorized in an extraordinary way to compensate for the restrictions and new customs that the outbreak of the virus meant would continue to function definitively. Very few expected that ordering all this would turn out to be so complex. Just don’t get lost among the numbers in Dona Fe. The plan was to begin retiring the New Jerseys in mid-2022.
In mid-2020, the Council installed 3,668 exceptional terraces, 1,550 of which were located in parking strips, traffic lanes, chamfers… At the end of 2019, Barcelona had issued 5,704 terrace licenses totaling around 25,800 tables. At the moment we are talking about 6,375 permits and 29,800 tables. Municipal sources state that of the 671 new licenses, 474 were exceptional authorizations resulting from the pandemic and 197 responded to ordinary requests. The City Council also authorized 657 extensions of terraces that were already in operation. The city will maintain 1,131 new terraces and consolidated extensions. Therefore, Barcelona restaurateurs will have around 4,000 more tables than when the pandemic hit. Most of them, all those planted on the roads, will be in decent modules approved by the Consistory.
The City Council has already withdrawn 2,325 New Jersey and 5,550 Sevillanas employed to flank these vigilantes. The sources also assure that the City Council dismantled nine out of ten temporary terraces.
The Lieutenant of Urbanism, the commune Janet Sanz, congratulated herself yesterday that Barcelona has recovered normality, which improves the situation for pedestrians and frees up public space, she postulated. Most of the consolidated extraordinary terraces are installed on asphalt. In this way, Barcelona will finally rid itself of these airs of a city mired in a war conflict, of unprecedented provisionality. Anyone who has traveled in recent months, who has been near Madrid, Bilbao, Seville, Granada, Palma or other cities where terraces also proliferate, will have seen that the situation in Barcelona had become unsettlingly particular, that there it has been a long time since the pandemic had remained mostly in the memory, that they had recovered normality much earlier.
Perhaps because of the tug-of-war led by the restaurant lobby and the entities that see the terraces as a source of inconvenience. These conflicts are mainly manifested in the districts of Ciutat Vella and Eixample. The deputy mayor of Urbanism also assured that the municipal criterion has always been the same, the municipal terrace ordinance. But it is also true that even with the mask on at all times, the Colau government bluntly proclaimed that the new terraces planted on the roads had come to Barcelona to stay, and that later, as the city recovered the dust and therefore its old problems, the position of the municipal executive seemed stricter. In fact, the Restoration Guild itself, which a few months ago denounced with indignation a massive denial of the renewal applications submitted, celebrated yesterday that in the end “common sense” prevailed.
The delay in the final withdrawal of the New Jerseys with respect to the municipal forecasts is largely due to the fact that the City Council did not calibrate the true magnitude of the administrative work involved. In addition, not a few restaurateurs responded with a pile of allegations to many of the refusals issued by the City Council in Ciutat Vella and Eixample, an extreme that did nothing but slow down the process even more.
