Everything was fine. The food. The treatment. The attention. The services. Until the tourists left at the beginning of autumn. "From one day to the next, we went from being good families to bad families," explains a Syrian woman who is part of a large group of asylum seekers residing in Malgrat de Mar and who denounce the feeling of "abandonment" they have experienced since October. They claim to have found cockroaches in the food, to have been given flowery and expired food, to have had fleas in the rooms, for the heating not to have worked for months on one of the floors of the hotel where they are staying, for the hot water to have constant problems, and for being denied money to buy clothes or transportation tickets that they are entitled to.

The centre for the reception of refugees that the Spanish Ministry of Inclusion set up in one of the pavilions at Fira de Barcelona opened this Friday at half throttle. Users are required to get an appointment over the telephone in advance, but the line to request an appointment won't be up until tomorrow. in addition, the staff to process temporary protection documents for Ukrainians fleeing the war was not yet ready. "We have many questions and few answers," laments Alexandra, who does not want to give her last name, and who has come all the way to Montjuic to find out "what is the next step" she has to take. She arrived in Barcelona with her sister and three underage nephews and is staying with a daughter who lives in Barcelona. She explains that for days she has also been trying to contact the police, but that, like this Friday, she has had no luck either because there are no free appointments "until who knows when".