"We call the City of Justice twice a month and the answer is always the same." It's been almost eight months since Montse Aguilar... a worker from the cleaning services of the Barcelona City CouncilMontse died upon arriving home after a workday during the heat wave at the end of June. Since then, her family has been waiting for the final autopsy to determine the cause of death so they can take legal action and argue in court that it was a workplace accident, not a random death. "They tell us they have nothing. We haven't received any new information since September 8th," Clara Aguilar, Montse's sister, explained to ARA.

The family of Montse Aguilar, the Barcelona City Council cleaning worker who died on June 28th during the heat wave upon arriving home from work, announced this Wednesday that they will sue both the city council and the subcontracted company FCC if the final autopsy confirms that the cause of death was heat stroke. These legal actions would be taken through both social and criminal channels.

Laia Bonet (Valls, 1972) is the first female deputy mayor of Barcelona City Council. She has two of the city's most pressing issues: housing and urban planning. She is overseeing the ARA (Argentine National Assembly) as her term approaches its midpoint.

The number of people in Barcelona who live with dogs has not stopped growing in recent years, to the point that, according to the City Council, there are already over 180,000 dogs living in the city (174,316 of them identified with a chip, according to data from the College of Veterinarians), which is considerably more than, for example, the 171,863 children under 12 years of age who are registered on the census. But, despite the growth, the city has not yet resolved an important aspect for the coexistence with pets in squares and streets: defining where they can and cannot be let off the leash. This issue has been dragging on since 2014, when the Council modified the ordinance for the protection and keeping of animals to allow police to fine dog-owners whose pets were off the lead. At that time it was already agreed that the measure, which was to involve fines of at least €100, could not be enforced immediately because the city at that time was not ready: it was necessary to ensure that there were sufficient spaces for the recreation of dogs before prohibiting them to go off the lead.

Barcelona is immersed in the complete renovation of metro L5 tracks between La Sagrera and Horta stations. These works will have a considerable impact on commuters, since over a quarter of the total number of metro passengers use this line. To minimise their impact, the works have been scheduled to coincide with the off-season: there was already a first cut coinciding with the Easter holidays, and commuters will now suffer a longer interruption, between July and August. From July 1 there will be no service between the stations of La Sagrera and Vilapicina. This will last throughout the month and, from August onwards, the works will extend to Horta station. The link between La Sagrera and Carmel will not be resumed until August 31.

The announcement comes from 2014: Barcelona will fine dog owners who walk their dogs off the leash outside the designated areas. The problem was, then, that these spaces were scarce, small and poorly adapted to the needs of animals. Therefore, the amendment of the ordinance for the protection and possession of animals that included these new penalties came into force linked to a moratorium: until there were enough spaces enabled there would be no fines for carrying pets off leash. Now the city already has 113 recreational areas for dogs, 41 of them over 400 square meters, but has not yet deployed the so-called shared-use areas (ZUC), which are those spaces where, in certain time slots, dogs can walk off leash and without the limitation of any fence, whether parks, streets or squares. It has to define one in each neighbourhood -a total of 73-, but the subject is dragging from the last term, when there were tensions between the municipal government and the entities representing dog owners due to some of the proposals, which animal rights advocates considered insufficient. Now the political guardianship of the project has changed hands and has corresponded to the socialist Laia Bonet, who inherited the list and today has explained in committee that some of these proposed spaces, which have not been made public, are now occupied by extraordinary school uses due to the new needs of the pandemic.