Sant Blai street has historically been one of the most commercial in Tortosa and well illustrates the changes the city has undergone in recent years. In the capital of Baix Ebre live about 36,000 people, 23.5% of whom are of foreign origin. Many of the immigrants work in the fields or run small establishments in the city. This is the case of Oman, who opened a restaurant on Sant Blai street a year and a half ago, the Luxury Rif. It is flanked by a call shop, on one side, and a kebab shop, a few meters away. A neighbor enters and asks if he minds if he orders something to eat. Oman, who is in the middle of Ramadan when we do this report, says no. "We are here, working hard," he explains about the business, where traditional Moroccan food is served. Moroccans are the foreign population group with the most weight in the region: they represent 30% of foreigners, according to Idescat data.
A closed premises in the Remolins neighbourhoodTjerk van der Meulen
"We have a lot of foreign people and the businesses here have closed. The people who have opened these businesses have every right, but in the old town, for example, they have abandoned us. We need it to be an attractive place again," explains to l'ARA the president of the neighborhood association of this area of the municipality, Tomàs Serrato. Tula Llorach, from the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Tortosa, agrees, warning that the historic center has 30 years of degradation, with cleaning problems and boarded-up buildings to prevent squatting. Long-time residents are leaving for more affluent areas of the surroundings, while newcomers with fewer resources are settling in neighborhoods like Santa Clara or Remolins. These neighborhoods look with hope at the neighborhood plan to regenerate streets and blocks that are falling apart.
At the City Council, they deny coexistence problems and, beyond specific conflicts, emphasize that education is needed to normalize diversity. The mayor, Mar Lleixà (ERC), receives ARA at the consistory shortly after taking the reins from the until now mayor, Jordi Jordà (Comuns), with whom the term has been shared. Lleixà emphasizes social initiatives launched by her government in mental health and education, as well as a specific department on Catalan to prevent its use from declining in one of the most Catalan-speaking areas of the Principality. "Just as many people from Tortosa have relatives who emigrated to Switzerland, here there are people who come to find a better life," she argues. She does not deny the degradation of some spaces, but warns that it is not something that can be solved in a couple of years. Changes are already underway in the cleaning contract to remedy this.
Social initiatives such as the Panxampla community center or the Atzavara reception center have been working with newcomers and residents on joint projects for some time, in conjunction with a social intervention and cultural mediation project under the name of "community process" that the City Council launched in 2010 with the "la Caixa" Foundation. One of the main problems they have to face, explains Guillem, from the community center, is the segregation that occurs in the city, with two highly complex schools where the children of immigrants do not end up mixing with those of the city.
Looking back
The situation reminds, for some, of what was experienced in the early 2010s, when the historic mayor of Tortosa, Ferran Bel, took the bull by the horns and began to apply drastic measures to reduce fraudulent registrations in the city. The former mayor, now retired from politics, explains to el ARA that the situation was dramatic, with buses of people in irregular situations whom mafias were leaving in Tortosa. In three years, he deregistered more than 4,000 registered residents by tightening registration criteria, a case that ended up on the desk of the ombudsman.
The unrest in the historic neighborhoods is the perfect breeding ground for the far-right to re-emerge, which already set foot there in 2011 with a councilor from Plataforma per Catalunya. Bel applied a cordon sanitaire: he convinced the opposition not to answer his questions or vote on his proposals, a strategy that bore fruit when, in the following legislature, they disappeared from the council. The left-wing forces in Tortosa, however, have another interpretation of this story: if the far-right disappeared from the city and has not reappeared – although Aliança already has a group there – it is because Junts per Tortosa already adopts a similar discourse. The former mayor and current leader of the opposition, Meritxell Roigé, defends herself by saying that one only needs to walk on the street to see that there is a problem with immigration: "There is a feeling that those who have just arrived are getting ahead of the neighbors. This is fueling racism in the city and we must put a stop to it," she emphasizes.
View of Sant Blai streetTjerk van der Meulen
The portrait that the left-wing parties paint of Tortosa is that of a conservative city, where there has always been a certain organized, but minority, activism. Tortosa's "caciquismo" (bossism) is also a recurring criticism among the city's progressive sectors, who have seen in the ERC and Comuns government the opportunity to wrest the city's future from the hands of "the usual suspects," as Alberich defines them. The debate surrounding the Francoist monument in Tortosa, they maintain, also illustrates this situation. Esther Baiges, from the Commission for the removal of Francoist symbols, attributes the reluctance of many Tortosa residents to get rid of it to the "forgetfulness" of a city that suffered very harsh repression and a post-war period. "There is also the feeling that outsiders should not come and tell Tortosa residents what to do. Many times we have felt like the backyard of Catalonia," she concludes.
![A closed premises in the Remolins neighbourhood](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 3200 2132"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
