This week dawned cold, rainy and unpleasant, but there the dozen of tents who have spent a few months (intermittently) in the Barcelona beachesgiving shelter to a group made up mainly of sub-saharan migrants. The almost summery autumn has provided a protective sky for this homeless group with little income in recent weeks, but the arrival of the cold will put their resistance in check, without them having a plan B for the winter other than to continue living poorly in the zone. The city council assures that it has already tried to offer them social attention, but they have rejected it.
By mid-morning almost everyone was sleeping or did not want to leave the tents, which are strategically placed near the structures of the beach bars –which were half dismantled– in the Sant Sebastia in order to shelter a little from the wind. They group three by three or four by four in the small tents that offer little protection from the elements. In summer they are a sauna and in winter, a freezer.
And now it’s cold, he explains to this newspaper the young senegalese who leaves a store, stretches and goes to a nearby supermarket. She agrees to report that she has been in the settlement for three months, in a store, without any work activity and living off what they are given, she affirms.
Regarding his colleagues, he adds that almost all are from Senegal and Gambia, with the common problem “not have papers”, which prevents them from getting a job and getting ahead. That it is a hard life, but that they do not receive help.
Vulnerability and coexistence
The group, which has made its home in the sand on the beach, spends part of the day entrenched in the shops and also meets for hours around the Plaza del Mar and in the square at the end of Calle de Pescadors . It’s something heterogeneous sometimes it integrates a woman, and even occasionally a minoras documented by the neighbors with photos, but generally they are made up of young and middle-aged men. “They have been in the neighborhood and on the beach for many months, they are normally quiet but there are some who, if they drink, start a fight,” sums up a neighbor who watches them daily from his balcony.
For this reason, and after some neighborhood complaints about the alleged consumption and sale of drugs by some of them, the Urban Police has carried out specific evictions from the square. “The next day they come back because they have nowhere to go,” adds the same source. Opinion in the area is divided, some residents claim the help of the administrations and try to offer food or clothing, while others stress that a part of the group has alcoholism problems that complicate their integration.
At bedtime they can be seen in the Barceloneta or Sant Sebastià section. Despite the fact that camping on the coast is prohibited, they have found a precarious and temporary way out of their lack of a roof.
It is not an easy settlement for administrations to manage, because there are people who enter and leave the group, if they find an alternative. Municipal sources justify that in this case the affected “reject the social care offered”. From the Social Rights area, they defend that the city council “monitors all the dynamics that occur in the city, also those that are a priori more exclusive and invisible.”
Within its “competence framework” -since Social Welfare and the National Police also intervene in this area in the case of Immigration– it serves “everyone who is in the city regardless of their origin”. But sometimes people in vulnerable situations do not accept links with social services, which cannot force anyone to receive help, they excuse.
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From the Vein Association of Barcelonetawhich has closely followed this situation, its president Manel Martínez, demand that surveillance of those who cause coexistence problems be maintained, and that integration work be carried out from the Social Services with the most vulnerable people.
Precisely this week marks one year of the tragedy in Plaza Tetuan. On November 30, 2021, a couple and their two children who lived in an abandoned bank office in Barcelona died when the premises burned down. The incident exposed the persistence of substandard housing in the city and the inability of the institutions to reverse it effectively.