Mayor Ada Colau’s government is preparing an emergency plan to curb the exasperating overcrowding of the Carmel bunkers. Agents of the Guardia Urbana confiscated a few loudspeakers and colored lights this weekend, so they aborted a couple of clandestine parties, and late Sunday afternoon they evicted nearly a thousand people gathered at the site . Unfortunately, the police action is nothing more than loose cotton.
The young visitors then moved to other parts of Turó de la Rovira. Many nearby residents are fed up with the shouting, the litter, the mobility problems… Their videos and photographs attest to how their streets were transformed into an improvised passageway for thousands of tourists, a stream of people stocked with beer cans, wine bottles, and even red and white checkered tablecloths…
“Despite the fact that in May the fences will be ready to close the place during the night – details the councilor responsible for the district of Horta-Guinardó, the socialist Rosa Alarcón -, this special device of two commands and ten agents of the Urban Guard, more twice as long as the previous one, it will run every weekend until at least October. We are reinforcing it with auxiliary staff in charge of facilitating traffic. The City Council will finance everything with the income from the tourist tax. In addition, this weekend the device had the support of the UREP, the reinforcement unit for emergencies and proximity”.
In any case, as Councilor Alarcón herself acknowledges, the police reinforcements are nothing more than palliative measures aimed mainly at mitigating the growing neighborhood unrest in the short term, to prevent this massification from getting even worse this summer . “To reverse this situation, we must also work in the medium and long term – adds the councillor. We need to change the visitors, remove the Carmel bunkers from the tourist guides, stop promoting it as the ideal viewpoint and highlight only its historical character. In this sense, its imminent museumization must play a key role. We will make sure that neither films nor commercials are recorded there again; maybe some historical documentary”.
On Twitter, on Instagram and especially on TikTok, this emblematic viewpoint is continuously presented as one of the best places in the world to have a very alternative party. Who the hell wants to go to a nightclub of a lifetime when they can…? The message going around the world is that if you come to Barcelona you can’t miss the Saraus del Carmel. The monster got out of hand a long time ago. It all started about ten years ago. These people have no idea who Pijoaparte is.
“We are very satisfied with the work of the Guardia Urbana agents – say a few nearby residents -. The problem is that traffic restrictions don’t quite work.” “The buses go up to the limits – say others -. In fact, many residents of the neighborhood prefer not to approach it at certain times. And also a barbarity of taxis and VTCs arrive continuously. They have to put pylons to close the neighborhood every day, and not just on weekends.” “The City Council is now in a great hurry to do what it did not do for so many years”.
“We are not against tourism, but against mass tourism. In the morning many people come to visit the bunkers, and nothing happens; that’s why they’re there, the bunkers, that’s why the lookout is there… They’re polite and they respect us!â€. “But in the afternoon everything gets out of control. If they are evicted from one point, they move to another. And what can you do about it…”. “At six in the morning the cleaning crews come and they have to go up and down five or six times because of all the rubbish they find there”. “Closing the viewpoint only during the night will move the problems, but it won’t do anything.” “We’ll see these days, we’ll see this summer.”
