The day after the fire that caused two minor injuries, the Guardia Urbana deployed a special operation on Wednesday morning to evacuate the shantytown settlements located under the Calatrava bridge In Barcelona, ​​next to the Sagrera construction site. The settlement is located on the corner of Bac de Roda and Huelva streets. Several officers—who are coordinating the operation—have been deployed to the scene, along with vans from the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police), fire trucks from the Barcelona Fire Department, personnel from the Social Emergency and Urgent Care Center (CUESB), and cleaning services from the Barcelona City Council. Around fifty people live in squalid conditions in this area, according to data from the Sant Andreu housing union. Municipal sources confirmed on Tuesday that there are also minors among these families. The operation took place a day after the fire and was prompted, as is often the case, by a Fire Department report concluding that there is a "very serious risk" to the people living there and that action must be taken "urgently."

A Barcelona court has acquitted Paco Peral, the father of Rosa Peral, in the case in which he was accused of lying to protect her while she was being investigated for the murder of a member of the Barcelona Municipal Police. The ruling confirms that the man lied to the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) who were handling the case, but dismisses a conviction because the deception had no bearing on determining his daughter's guilt. Former Municipal Police officer Rosa Peral is serving a sentence for the 2017 murder of her partner, fellow officer Pedro Rodríguez, committed along with her lover and patrol partner, Albert López.

HeBarcelona Urban Guard agent who fired a shot in 2020 A homeless man who was walking along Passeig de Sant Joan with a knife in his hand has been acquitted without ever having to go to trial. The judges of the Second Section of the Barcelona Court of Appeals have dismissed the Arrels Foundation from the case at the last minute. This has overturned the only remaining accusation against the officer, as the Prosecutor's Office did not accuse him of any crime, and the victim's lawyer was also dismissed because the man who lived on the streets, Marjan, has been untraceable for years.

The father of Rosa Peral, one of those convicted for the crime committed by the Urban Guard, faces a year and four months in prison for allegedly lying in court while trying to exonerate his daughter. A defendant can lie to defend themselves in court, but witnesses are prohibited from doing so. Paco Peral was tried this week for the alleged crime of false witness, for which the Prosecutor's Office is also demanding a fine of €1,800, according to the indictment obtained by ARA and ratified by the prosecutor at this week's trial. In addition, the father and daughter are awaiting another trial in which they are accused of concealing assets to avoid compensating the victim's family. The prosecution is seeking four years in prison for her and three and a half years for him.

Barcelona has been the scene of an illegal race. According to a video shared on social media by one of the participants, around thirty suicide cyclists rode down Avinguda Diagonal from end to end on June 21st. The route began at the Palau de Congressos and ended at the Fòrum. The cyclists covered the more than 10 km between these two sections in just over 17 minutes. Under normal circumstances and respecting traffic regulations, this distance takes at least 40 minutes.

A man sits by his shopping cart and tries on shoes. Others gossip, wandering around between the sheets – and the tablecloth – lying on the floor. There are about fifteen of them, one next to the other, and on display are used shoes, toys (some with their boxes and others old), keyboards, some jewellery, second or third hand clothes... It is a fleamarket known as the market of misery, which offers a wide range of objects, usually recovered from the rubbish and which, since February, was cleared from the Ronda Sant Antoni. Instead, it is now set up every afternoon in the streets of the Raval. It is usually in the small Plaça del Dubte, on Riera Alta street, next to the Ronda Sant Antoni, but it also sometimes expands in neighbouring alleys such as Cendra or Requesens. Some times there are ten vendors and at others about thirty or even more, and now in summer they are usually there from the early afternoon until after eleven o'clock at night. If they see the police, they leave for a while and come back later.

Barcelona is preparing for a Sant Joan festival which will be reminiscent of 2019. It is focussing on two points: the first is crowds on the beaches, where around 60,000 people are expected to gather; the other is wooded areas, due to the high risk of fire throughout Catalonia. "We are in a critical moment and any carelessness can cause a fire," warned Security councillor Albert Batlle, who recalled the ban on the use of fire within 500 meters of wooded areas, and remarked that the Guardia Urbana will pay special attention to the parts of the city that are closer to the mountains. The city adds one more recommendation: avoiding as far as possible launching fireworks and sky lanterns, as they pose a fire risk. The head of the Civil Protection, Fire Prevention and Rescue Service, Sebastià Massagué, has asked for "extreme caution" and avoiding this kind of pyrotechnics.

Viruses permitting, after two years of the pandemic, this summer will again resemble 2019, the last before covid struck. Since Easter, the city has been full of tourists and even more are expected to come. Their increased presence is linked to a growth in crime, often with foreign visitors as recurring victims. Thefts and robberies, in fact, are already above 2020 numbers – when crimes bottomed out – and last year, but still below 2019, when they reached an all-time high and there was talk of a "security crisis" in the city. With this data, the Guardia Urbana and also the Mossos are preparing for a summer that will bring back some old problems, although not all: the presence of street sellers in Barcelona is at a minimum, according to data from the City Council.

A piece of a bus shelter fell into the fountains on Avinguda Maria Cristina. Broken glass all over the Palau de Congressos and, even so, the mass vaccination point is still active. Car number plates broken among the glass. These are just some of the traces of the lack of control of a mass street drinking party in Plaça Espanya in Barcelona and its surroundings which, tonight, the second night of La Mercè, brought together up to 40,000 people. A leap in scale compared to the 15,000 on the first night. And a leap in scale, too, with respect to the riots. The gathering resulted in 20 arrests and 43 injured, three of them seriously and 13 with stab wounds. Shops on Carrer Creu Coberta were vandalised and robbed.

From tomorrow, Barcelona is getting ready to experience a Festes de la Mercè that will bring it a little closer to recovering the spirit of a town festivity. The parades and the fire festival, which could not be held last year, will be back, and this time the format is expected to be even more pandemic: with a static audience and restricted seating capacity. It will be a perimetrical Mercè because all the stages of the festival will be closed and only those people who have booked tickets in advance will be able to enter, a maximum of 3,000 in the most crowded areas. The City Council, in fact, with the aim of avoiding the feared crowds as much as possible, is asking everyone without a reservation not to try to get near the stages because they will be so far away that they will not be able to enjoy the show. Parks around the stages and vehicle access to nearby areas will also be closed. And there is concern about what might happen in the areas that are not part of the festival, which will remain free of fences and open, therefore, to street drinking parties like any other weekend, but with a foreseeable increase in the number of people on the street and with the reopening -still very limited- of nightlife, which will only be able to use the outdoor areas.

The Catalan police is investigating the death of a 37-year-old Dutch tourist who was restrained by local police in Barcelona on Thursday. The facts happened when, at 10.45 pm, workers of a supermarket on Avinguda Riera de Cassoles, in Sarriá - Sant Gervasi district, alerted the police that a man had entered the shop in an "obvious state of great exaltation" and was causing a disturbance. When officers arrived at the supermarket, they tried to restrain him and he lost consciousness shortly afterwards. His vital signs could not be detected.

They were from Romania but had been living for some time in a shack on a plot of land in the Poble-sec neighbourhood in Barcelona. They had no schooling and could neither read nor write. They are two underage siblings, a 16-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. Their family forced the girl to prostitute herself and the boy was sent to clean car windows to beg for alms in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat. The National Police and the Guardia Urbana of Barcelona have freed them in an operation in which they have arrested three relatives of the victims: one is their older sister and another their aunt.

After the end of the curfew, the number of people drinking and partying in the streets without keeping their distance is on the increase in Barcelona. Despite calls for caution from the Department of Health and the heads of the security forces, tonight the crowds of the previous night were repeated and even increased: if from Friday to Saturday the police evicted some 7,000 people, yesterday there were 9,055, a figure considerably higher than the 6,500 evicted on the first night without a state of alarm. The Ciutat Vella district and especially the beaches were once again the most crowded yesterday. On Sant Miquel beach alone, some 2,000 people were evicted in a single pass by the Mossos and the Guardia Urbana, and in this case it was decided to redirect those gathered in the direction of Passeig de Joan de Borbó along the seafront to prevent them from returning to the streets of Barceloneta. Two other points with large crowds - and a large presence of foreigners - were, once again, Passeig del Born and Passeig Lluís Companys, which were also cleared, and three premises were inspected for non-compliance with opening hours, according to the municipal report.

After the large crowds after the first night without curfew, the situation was more "normal" yesterday in Barcelona, as explained by City Security Councillor Albert Batlle in an interview with Radio 4. The police dispersed 1,639 people from places like the Passeig del Born, Plaça de la Virreina de Gràcia or Plaça dels Àngels, as confirmed to ARA by municipal sources, while Saturday night the police had to disperse about 6,500 people in various outdoor celebrations. According to Batlle, what was experienced in the streets on Saturday night could not be avoided because people, after so many months of curfew, were eager to go out, and the police deployed saturation devices that sought to limit gatherings, but did not hand out fines to those gathering. Batlle detailed that in total there were 450 agents deployed and that this was "manifestly insufficient" for the number of people who were on the street. "We can not have a police officer for each person," he admitted.

His name is Fouzi, but in the neighbourhood he is affectionately known as Cucu, and he is convinced that today, Aurelio Vázquez, a security guard at the Gimnàs Social Sant Pau in the Raval, saved his life. He was sleeping in his sleeping bag, in the street, in a protected space that he sometimes uses if it rains or is windy, when a group of three young men, who looked like neo-Nazis, surrounded him and poured petrol over him with gasoline. It was eight o'clock in the morning and the attack did not go any further because Aurelio prevented it. Dressed in a black uniform and with handcuffs in his pocket, he caught the attention of the three attackers when he saw them throw a liquid on the homeless man, whom he knows because he is a user of the gym: two of them ran off along Ronda Sant Pau towards Sant Antoni market and the third one confronted the security worker with insults and, finally, also ran away. The security guard checked that the liquid was gasoline.