These days of torrid Barcelona and Saint John's festival there are no locals in the streets, only visitors. It suits me because I really like walking among strangers when I need to clear my head, I like hearing different languages and observing people who, after a year of work, decide to spend their savings in our home. We must be doing something right, and it's not just the beaches. I walk worried about the news of structural corruption in Spain, but I lift my gaze from the screen and enter the stairs of the Hospital Clínic from the metro. There is a grand piano, played by a young man with sensitivity, as if he were at the Liceu. Patients stop there, children fall silent, and when the recital ends, everyone returns to their routines. Next to the bust of doctor Valentí Carulla, there is a sign explaining that more than 8,000 people work at the Clínic every day and night of the year, whatever the brawl in Congress or the media event of the moment. Here, doctors have earned the moral authority of those who resolve, with knowledge generated over centuries, critical health complications in patients of all kinds. Hospitals were invented long before states, and they are the last bastion of civilization when, in the Western world, voters turn to the right seeking quick solutions. Walking through the Clínic is an effective vaccine against fear, and it helps to regain confidence in the caring society. 

The current malaise of democracy admits no euphemisms. The institutions that uphold it have lost the trust of the majority of citizens they are supposed to represent. The data, accumulated survey after survey, depict an erosion that is not conjunctural but structural, and which connects with the crisis of the liberal democratic model throughout the West, but which in Spain adopts its own and particularly worrying forms.

Illegal street vending, drugs on public streets, and skyrocketing filth. This is what many residents and shopkeepers in Barcelona's Sant Antoni neighborhood have been experiencing for months. "We've reached the limit: either we report it now or it will get worse. We want a political reaction," say Sant Antoni Encants, one of the neighborhood associations that issued a letter on Monday to the Eixample and Ciutat Vella city councils to express their discontent over the "deterioration it is suffering." In it, they detail that the increase in uncivil behavior affects neighborhood coexistence and, in turn, has a direct impact on local businesses.