The Barcelona Urban Guard, with the collaboration of the Mossos d’Esquadra, began at eight o’clock this Friday morning the eviction of one of the Montjuïc settlements. Specifically, it is the most visible mountain camp, on Josep Carner street. The operation is focused on an area of tents located on Miramar road, next to the Litoral ring road and near the fire station. Several dozen people with various health problems and an extreme degree of social exclusion live there in poor conditions.
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The operation also involves social services, cleaning teams, and the Barcelona Public Health Agency. The City Council justifies the intervention by claiming that the homeless campers — the vast majority with extreme vulnerability, because in some cases mental health problems and addictions add to the homelessness situation — have caused “serious problems of security, health, and coexistence” in the area. So far, it has not specified how many people have been evicted, although several organizations working with these groups say it is about fifty. “Normally around 70 people spend the night there, but they had already been warned about the eviction and many did not wait,” highlighted the spokesperson of one of the organizations.
The settlement is part of the various substandard housing clusters installed on Montjuïc mountain, where the City Council counted more than 200 people sleeping outdoors last May. The problem is that the City Council will offer these people to spend some nights at the Barcelona Social Urgencies and Emergencies Center (CUESB), but these groups usually do not trust this type of shelter. It happens that the leader of the PP in Barcelona, Daniel Sirera, requested on Thursday the dismantling of the settlements distributed throughout the mountain.
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This place has become the hideout — although increasingly visible — of those who have been left on the margins of the margins. The combination of homeless people, addictions, petty crime, and lack of the most basic hygiene conditions has turned this corner of Barcelona into a place where it is hard to see the hand of the administrations.
