A demonstration against squatting of two houses in the Bonanova square in Barcelona took place this afternoon amid moments of great tension. During almost three hoursthe residents have protested in the bourgeois heart of Barcelona, among an important deployment of riot units of the Mossos d’Esquadra, which have kept traffic cut in the entire area.
The deputy in Parliament and mayor of Ciutadans for Barcelona, Anna Grau, has participated in the demonstration, which has come to concentrate hundreds of people. Neighbors and onlookers alerted by the public address system and police deployment. The shouts towards the premises occupied for years by anti-system groups have been constant.
✌️FOR LES FORCES D’OKUPACIO del Kubo de Sant Gervasi i de tota Barcelona
✌️And thanks to the @mossos for protecting us and protecting the neighbors. Together we will end this savagery#WordofGrau pic.twitter.com/HSYU43nAp0—Anna Grau (@annagrauarias) April 25, 2023
At the beginning of the protest, a part of the squatters left the houses, which has provoked some police racing and the throwing of objects from the occupied houses against the police cordon that the Mossos have established. Grau has denounced in a video in Twitter that “the neighbors are desperate” and has lamented the “cowardice” of the Mossos d’Esquadra because “they do not dare to remove them”.
“Squats outside of Bonanova” or “Scum outside of Bonanova”was what a woman in front of the protest repeated with the megaphone in hand, who before retiring has mentioned the date of May 7. The withdrawal of the Mossos units, at the edge of 10 at night, has been received with a roar inside the premises and with indignation on the part of the concentrated residents.
fortified
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The two buildings on Sant Joan de la Salle street next to Plaza Bonanova, in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood, have been occupied since 2016 and 2019 respectively and coexistence with the neighbors has been generally peaceful until recently. But in recent weeks the tension has been increasing amid rumors of an eviction that the squatters themselves had reported would take place in March but which was apparently postponed. That, however, led them to fortify the buildings with fences and building materials and to threaten that “Sant Gervasi will burn down” if the eviction takes place.
The two constructions are one-story houses, baptized by the okupa movement as ‘The Kubo’ and ‘The Ruin’. Both are owned by sareb and one functions as a home and the other as a social premises.