If the traffic, the noise of the firecrackers and the citizen occupation of sidewalks, squares and beaches can be used as an indicator of success, then it is safe to say that Catalonia recovered this Thursday night the pre-pandemic normality with a massive celebration of the festival of Sant Joan, with the celebration of a festival of Sant Joan that started in a relaxed way. There were crowds, but controlled and without fear of possible covid infections, despite the fact that the virus is on the rise again.
A total of 161,362 vehicles had left, around 8:00 p.m., from the Barcelona area in the first five hours of the holiday bridge exit operationcollapsing, once again, the main exit routes from the metropolitan area, such as the AP-7 and the A-2. The figure was only slightly lower than that recorded in 2016, the last year that Sant Joan fell on a Friday.
At sunset, on Paseo de Colom in Barcelona, dozens of people walked towards Barceloneta beach. The mass of people became somewhat thicker in Port Vell, where lThe terraces of the restaurants looked full Of customers. The bustle of pedestrians along the Paseo de Joan de Borbón towards the beach flowed smoothly. “From 12 o’clock everything will get complicated,” predicted, however, a taxi driver.
Among the crowd, there is a woman and a girl with amazed faces. They are Irina and Carolina. The adult, originally from Armenia, has been living in Barcelona for two years. The girl, explains the eldest, was born in the Ukraine and has only been in the Catalan capital for two weeks, where she arrived fleeing the war. “She’s my brother’s daughter,” says Irina.
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Among many tourists (the majority of those who occupied the beaches of Barceloneta were), Lina cooks meat on an electric griddle and her husband takes refuge in a mini-store. “People are calm compared to other years and before the pandemic, but it is early. There are less people, but a lot of tourists,” says the woman.
He too Rodali’s service noted the increase in the influx of users, but without narrowness. The trains of the R2 Sur line traveled with dozens of citizens loaded with bags of food and portable coolers, ready to spend the evening on one of the Baix Llobregat beaches. In the most popular, Castelldefels260 local police officers and Mossos d’Esquadra were deployed along the coast.