It was a request from the residents of the Gothic Quarter, the Old Town and the Raval for years, and finally the Barcelona City Council has taken action. The municipal government has announced that it is launching a pilot test to reduce Dirt on the streets of Barcelona, especially in these neighbourhoods of the Ciutat Vella district. And they will do so based on information and awareness, but also with greater sanctions. This was announced on Tuesday by the third deputy mayor and councillor of Ciutat Vella, Albert Batlle, who insisted that the problem does not focus on the work of the cleaning services –whom he has thanked for their work– but on the incivility of the "neighbours, merchants and visitors".

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.

"It's all destroyed, it's a great pity". Iliana Garcimarrero lives in the building most affected by the fire which broke out yesterday in Barcelona's Eixample. This morning, accompanied by firefighters, she was able to return home to collect a few belongings. "Above all what we need most: ID, credit cards and computers to work with. We left with nothing, running away from the fire," she says. She has also found that some of the memories she could not take with her remained intact: photographs of her daughters, the books her father wrote.... Everything that was made of wood, however, is gone.

Like energy, which does not disappear, but is transformed: with the Plaça Espanya in Barcelona armored by the police to prevent a repetition of the street drinking parties of the last two nights, young people who wanted to take advantage of another weekend night to party on the street changed their scenario. Yesterday, calls for different parties were already circulating on the networks: the most crowded was on the Bogatell beach and its surroundings, a space that is already the usual place for this type of gathering in the city, which yesterday was overwhelmed by the size of the gathering and by the destruction of premises.

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.

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.