El Vendrell, economic exile for Barcelona residents

El Vendrell"If you ask, some will tell you this is the Penedès, others that it's the Camp de Tarragona, but there are also those who will tell you it's the metropolitan area of Barcelona." Jon Olano is a sociologist and professor at the URV (University of Valencia). He knows El Vendrell very well. He has lived there since he was ten years old, when his family emigrated from a village in the Basque Country. He also wrote his doctoral thesis on this municipality. We listened to him and asked the mayor himself, Kenneth Martínez: "No, no, we are clear about it! We are Tarragona. For practical purposes, we are part of the Barcelona metropolitan area, and everything that happens in Barcelona affects us directly, but by tradition and culture, we look to Tarragona and the Penedès, of course. We are in the middle of everything," he concludes.

El Vendrell is the capital of the Baix Penedès and belongs to the Tarragona district. It's a difficult region, made up of the center (Vendrell), where 87% of the population lives, and small neighborhoods like Coma-ruga and Sant Vicenç de Calders. There are up to ten of them, and they all have their own realities. Some of them are dominated by residential developments, which have grown over the years as El Vendrell continued to gain population.

"Many people from the outskirts of Tarragona and Barcelona have come here, selling their apartments and buying a better one here because prices were cheaper," explains Maria Glòria, 75, who assures that everyone still knows each other in the center of town. "Look, look at this street here. We all know each other and say hello," she emphasizes as she says goodbye to a neighbor. In Plaza Nova, under the gaze of the Monument to Pau Casals, one of the municipality's most illustrious sons, Rafael Medina, 75, born in Extremadura, watches how he spends his day. "When I came to live here, 62 years ago, there were 7,000 of us. We all knew each other. Now there are 40,000 of us," he says, emphasizing the number.

In reality, you don't have to go that far back to find the population boom that has transformed El Vendrell. In 1998, there were 20,002 people living there, and by 2024, there were already 40,526. "From 2000 to 2008, we grew by around 10%, and now we're growing by 4%, which isn't bad either," explains the mayor. A good number of these new residents are people who have had to leave Barcelona due to rising apartment prices. "Every time we feel rents increase in Barcelona, ​​we open the door," he explains. There are also Barcelona residents who have sold their apartment in the big city and bought a small villa with a pool in one of El Vendrell's seaside neighborhoods.

One of those who left the capital to come here is 53-year-old Jaume Lázaro. He left the Barceloneta neighborhood in 2008, after separating from his partner and having family in El Vendrell, so he bought a house in a residential area. "I'm superb; I love the town and it's very peaceful," he says. He's not having a good time professionally, but he's happy with the change he made. However, the neighborhood where he was born hasn't forgotten him: "Those of us who are from Barceloneta will always say we're from Barceloneta, but a 33-square-meter apartment there costs 200,000 euros," he exclaims.

As in any other Catalan city, there are also some who come from further afield, like Dareeck (44 years old), born in Nador, although he has been living in Sant Jaume de Domenys for years. He recently divorced and is looking for an apartment in El Vendrell. "Prices have skyrocketed, they doubled in a short time," he laments. He has a good job, but many other migrants have yet to find one. At the Cáritas office, the vast majority of the people they serve are migrants. "They have precarious jobs and can't afford current rental prices," explains Aroa García, a social worker at this office. "For the past year, we've met someone who's just arrived every week." The path they must take until they obtain the documentation to be able to work is very complicated. "If they don't have papers, they are not entitled to any financial aid, at most the food provided by the Red Cross," he recalls.

Risk of gentrification

But El Vendrell isn't just receiving migrants or people who can't afford to live in Barcelona. "Since the pandemic, for the first time, we're finding that there are people who value the quality of life in El Vendrell and, intentionally, decide to come and live here," explains the mayor. This new profile of Vendrell residents is welcome, although they are also creating a problem. "It's good that we're incorporating families with a certain economic level, but if we're only placed on one side of the municipality, we run the risk of social segregation, and that's dangerous. We have to figure out how to manage it because this phenomenon is occurring fairly quickly," explains Martínez.

These new residents are concentrated mainly in Sant Salvador and part of Coma-ruga, the maritime area, where alarm bells are already ringing about possible gentrification. In fact, according to the mayor, two schools in this part of the city merged in 2019 because they didn't have enough students, and now they've had to expand. "The problem is timing. We're talking about growth that starts in 2021. That's only three years!" he exclaims, while highlighting the impossibility of getting ahead of challenges of this magnitude as mayor: "How do you foresee that a pandemic will come and that it will bring about a change in values that will question our place?

Martínez fears that some families who live in the center will also move to this area, which is increasing in value, and the heart of El Vendrell will end up emptying. This process is especially curious because, in the past, the neighborhoods that are now skyrocketing in value were the least attractive: "All these plots were inherited by women, because seawater was constantly entering and they didn't have much value. The heirs, on the other hand, kept the inland lands, which were much more highly valued," recalls Montse Salvó.

Blurring identity

If the maritime area is the most fashionable, the city center doesn't seem to be going through its best moment. "We're going downhill," laments Meritxell Nin, who owns a haberdashery in the heart of the city. She complains, "El Vendrell is becoming a commuter town, and not even the people who live here come to shop in the shops," which are gradually being forced to close. "Saturday afternoons are the only day everyone closes, and it used to be the best day! The city center is getting sadder and sadder," laments Dolors, a 65-year-old resident.

Olano, the URV professor, warns that "the problem is that people end up living in Barcelona." He complains, "the shops that were there before are gone, there are no big brands. It's hard to go shopping in the town's stores. In fact, you can live without even setting foot in the Plaça Vella," he says. The sharp increase in new residents, regardless of their profile, is isolating the city center and blurring its identity.

This risk is very present, as the mayor himself acknowledges. "As a city council, our great challenge is identity," he says. Martínez fears that one day someone from El Vendrell might be asked where they're from and answer "Barcelona," as is already happening in some metropolitan cities. To remedy this, last term they filled all the roundabouts at the entrance to the municipality with large letters indicating the town's name. "We're not doing it for outsiders. No! We're doing it because we want the people of El Vendrell to know they live in El Vendrell!" Last year, the Tabaris Museum was opened in Coma-ruga, also with the aim of telling the town's history to its inhabitants. Often, according to the mayor, the cultural power of El Vendrell, with names like Pau Casals, Àngel Guimerà, and Andreu Nin, is not sufficiently recognized.

Like Martínez and so many other residents, another person fighting the risk of losing their identity is Gemma Sivill, a fifth-generation Milà butcher. "If you want to find the bad side, you'll find it, but you have to put your heart into it. I love the culture, the commerce..." And she's one of those who puts in the effort: at 22, she's the president of the El Vendrell Market and also acts as a baton keeper, in addition to trying to convince friends who live in Barcelona to stay in El Vendrell. "You can do anything here," she says proudly.