Dining chairs, mattresses of all sizes, old televisions, blankets, and clothes. All gone. In just over two hours, what had been going on for the last three months was home The area where people were evicted from the former Institut B9 has been completely emptied. The encampment, where dozens of people had gathered on Tuesday morning, was by midday back to being just a sidewalk under the C-31 bridge, with gleaming white bike lane lines and cobblestones shiny with cleaning product. "They told us we were leaving to clean it up, but I don't think we can come back," a young man repeated as he crossed the police tape with a rickety shopping cart in one hand and a suitcase overflowing with people in the other.

"Hamsa, I don't see you at school." Joaqui Salord stops a young Moroccan man walking in flip-flops despite the harsh winter weather near Barranco del Búho, a filthy pit of garbage and plastic. The scene repeats itself a few minutes later, as the veteran Jesuit walks among the shacks of Don Domingo de Arriba, in Atochares, a settlement where nearly 600 people live. Kofi cleans his mud-caked clothes while listening to the radio in the background. The stains aren't even concealed by the Ghanaian veteran's meticulous brushing. The same question is posed, and Kofi, battered by poverty and emaciated from two years living among ruins, excuses himself by saying he missed the small open-air classroom the Jesuits run to teach Spanish to immigrants. Atochares is the largest settlement in the province of Almería. The lack of housing for those working in the greenhouses of the "sea of ​​plastic" has led to a proliferation of these substandard dwellings. In the Níjar Valley alone, in the Levante region of the vast "Orchard of Europe," there are almost fifty.

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."

It happened in Sant Andreu, but it could have happened anywhere. And it happened in the early hours of Tuesday, but it could have happened on any cold night this year or any of the past few years. Periodically, A fire burns down one of the barracks in one of the settlements that exist in Barcelona or its neighboring cities, and the focus is momentarily on a reality that has long been a concern in the Catalan capital. A problem that spreads throughout the territory and is exacerbated when, as these days, the cold weather arrives.

Several explosions and a large column of fire and smoke woke residents of Barcelona's Sant Martí district this morning. A fire in a shantytown at the intersection of Huelva and Bac de Roda streets—next to the La Sagrera construction site—injured two people and burned six of these structures. Firefighters, who received the call at 7:00 a.m., worked to extinguish the blaze with ten crews around 9:00 a.m. They continued to soak the burned area until mid-morning. One of the victims suffered burns, and another a cut finger. According to municipal sources, at least one of the two was taken to Vall d'Hebron Hospital, while the other was treated and released at the scene.

On the site in the Vallcarca neighborhood where, until last week, dozens of shacks stood, there are now about 300 yellow concrete blocks, of the New Jersey type., which prevent anything else from being installed there. There has been no trace of the shacks (and the people who lived there) since last Thursday, Barcelona City Council decided to speed up the eviction and clean up the entire camp. On Wednesday night, a short circuit in a heater caused a fire in one of the barracks –which left one young man injured– and that accelerated the entire process. So, after many weeks of controversy and back-and-forth, Jaume Collboni's government evicted the twenty people who were still staying overnight, citing security concerns.

Barcelona City Council has taken the first step toward evicting the Vallcarca shack settlement. First Deputy Mayor Laia Bonet explained this Tuesday that the people living in the settlement and those living in three occupied municipal properties nearby have already been notified that they cannot continue living in substandard housing. This is the first step in an administrative eviction process that Bonet admitted will be lengthy and could last "months."

From the outside it looks like a mountain of wood, fabric and scrap metal. But once inside, the prevailing organisation reveals a small community of neighbours, more or less an avenue. Life in the Vallcarca shanty town "is hard". This is admitted by Florina Drosu, who has lived there for years and has opened the doors of the site to receive a team from the ARA and explain how they are organised and how she and the rest of the neighbours live.

Tensions rise in the Vallcarca neighborhood around the settlement of shacks that has been providing shelter for some seventy people for years and which is located on municipal land where an urban development plan is planned to transform the neighbourhood. The Barcelona City Council has judicial authorisation to carry out a "technical inspection" of the settlement and analyse the conditions in which these people live, but the deadline ends this Saturday and so far they have not been able to gain access. The neighbours who live there, with the support of social movements in the neighbourhood, have prevented them from entering on up to three occasions, the last on 11 February: they fear that the inspection will end with an "express eviction" without a residential solution for those affected, a situation that they have been trying to negotiate for years without success.

"The premises did not meet the conditions of habitability," said Mayor Ada Colau when she arrived this morning at the scene of the fire which took the lives a family of two adults and two small children. And it was not a house, it was a bank office. The situation of substandard housing in which this family was living is neither an isolated case nor a new phenomenon. In Barcelona alone, more than 700 people are living in shanties and abandoned premises or spaces, according to the latest data from the Fundació Arrels, based on the Transparency portal of the Barcelona City Council.