No, no, no… We multiply like Dr. No's clones. He ends up winning and James Bond is condemned to live in a prison tent, a PVC dungeon, or a nylon cell. The Nos are now starting New Year's Eve. Amidst the drunken congratulations. Casually, but they mean it, in those emotional, liquid, pathetic, failed hours: do you know of any flats for the boy, the girl, or the marsupial?
No. There are no flats for all the kids who are now going to study at Barcelona's universities. No. Rental prices are through the stratocumulus, nimbostratus, cirrocumulus… And other relatives of inaccessible contact and dealings. No. Difficult to say without a telescope, but as the celestial estate agent advised: everything is to be done and everything is possible. Suddenly we soar to 1,800 euros a month. It goes up, up… To 2,300 (Segre cited a Deutsche Bank report putting the figure as the average for three-bedroom flats in Barcelona) and whatever interstellar idealism and extraterrestrials allow. The chicken is top-notch. We have gone from hen flight to space flight.
Since the dawn of time, students "from the regions", as if they were terrorist commandos, shared flats in Barcelona. These armed actions led to the best parties in the history of Catalonia; the sexual awakening to test the soundproofing of the rooms; avant-garde congresses on liquid society and solid hangovers; the emergence of new Catalan cuisine made from frozen foods; secret bunkers; friends forever; flings; marriages; divorces; births; resurrections… Catalonia is an incest. Student flats were Catalonia in miniature: kids from all over the country, and beyond, met, related, contaminated each other… They were the Royal Ministry of Territorial and Emotional Rebalancing. Here everything changed. Especially the future.
The no future of the children of the seventies, eighties, was not then: it is now and it is for their children. Today it is impossible to come to study in Barcelona and be able to live there. Because of the prices, the lack of flats, because they don't want students… For everything. Soon there will be rental advertisements for tiles only suitable for microbes with references from superior microorganisms. The future is living inside perforated brick buildings; sardine can residences; badger setts; ant nest toilets… Everything is possible and everything is to be done. And it will be achieved like any dream made of reality.
The immense, shiny posters at the entrances will announce the good news: “Don’t come to Barcelona”. That’s the message. That’s what they want. Especially if you are “from the territory”. Don’t even think about setting foot in the city. Catalans go home. Stay home, go out, get lost, leave, disappear… But you can whistle if Cobi doesn’t want to see, but he does dedicate himself to drinking.
All this has been happening for a very, very long time. We see it, we know it, we explain it (on August 17, 2025, I repeated it in the article “Why don’t they go to Barcelona?”). Because “The important thing is to keep your eyes wide open and engage in the bitter exercise of seeing things as they are,” wrote the poet from Lleida, Màrius Torres. He also shared a flat when he came to study medicine in Barcelona in 1926. Today he couldn’t. But today no one knows who he is. Who are the Torres. Barcelona is built, historically, by people from the rest of Catalonia. They are the first immigrants. Those whom the ill-intentioned city expels today.
