The room is large and spacious, with many screens on strategically placed tables. Arranged in a semicircle, they all face the same point: a wall with even larger screens displaying feeds from some of Barcelona's security cameras. They can see all the cameras in the city. This joint police control room is located on Lleida Street. During the Olympic Games, it served as the competition's server room, but for the last 20 years, it has been a nerve center for city security. Officers from the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan Police) and the Guardia Urbana (Barcelona's Municipal Police) are present. Next door is another room for the Barcelona Fire Department. On one screen, there is a Excel The system is color-coded: green indicates available resources, and red indicates those currently in use. Today, almost everything is green. It's a quiet day, but those in charge explain that these rooms are bustling with activity on key dates. Two important dates are coming up: New Year's Day and the Three Kings' Day parade.

Maru, 67, and her husband, Josep Manel, 68, had left home in the morning to go to the doctor. It was Monday, April 28, and the major blackout caught them leaving the hospital. They live in a nine-story penthouse in the Sant Andreu neighborhood, and Maru has been using an electric wheelchair since her accident in 2013. The elevator wasn't working, and they were forced to "walk around," eat something in a park, and wait. They waited until six in the evening, when they saw a Barcelona Fire Department vehicle and called for help. "Right at that moment, we were helping a person with reduced mobility get into their home," says Fire Department Corporal Yago Abad Galcerán.

At 3.50 am, the neighbours living in the block of buildings between València, Avinguda de Roma, Calàbria and Rocafort streets in Barcelona were awakened by a loud explosion. The deflagration started in a bar, but has generated fireballs that have spread up the building's façade and inner courtyard, which have also caused small fires in apartments in nearby properties. In total the fire has affected eight buildings. "We heard a clap of thunder thunderclap and I saw that a window had fallen out of its frame. With the explosion everything shook and I thought it was an earthquake", explains Laia Cardona, a neighbour who lives in the building where the fire started. Four people have been hospitalised, three in Vall d'Hebron hospital –one of them in serious condition– and one in Sagrat Cor. The seriously injured person is the owner of the bar, who the firefighters found in the street and who is in police custody suspected of starting the fire. The events are currently under investigation.

"The neighbours had long been warning that someday a misfortune would happen here and no one did anything. And today it happened... And it's terrible," explained a neighbour at number 20 Plaça Tetuan in Barcelona this Tuesday morning, where a fire early this morning claimed the lives of four members of a family: father, mother and two very young children, aged between one and three. They had been living in a former bank office of Evo Banco for more than a year, and the city social services had been monitoring the children since they were alerted, in 2020, that they were living in these squatted premises in poor conditions. Early this morning, for reasons still unknown, the ground floor caught fire and the family was trapped inside.