Our beloved Pitu Cunillera Gustems (1938-2026), shoemaker and activist from the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona, ​​has passed away. You left without receiving a proper tribute. You, who were the driving force that brought together the residents of what was then Barcelona's Fifth District. El Chino. El Raval. And who, after several attempts thwarted by the local government, founded the Fifth District Residents' Association in 1973, which was approved a year later. A curious association: first the children and the elderly. And of course, there had to be a Fun Committee, because for decades street parties had been what maintained solidarity and morale.

"I saw a boy staring at the ground, completely focused, and when I asked him what he was looking at, he said, 'There are ants.'" In the summer of 1993, Piarist and educator Enric Canet arrived at the Casal dels Infants in Raval with a broad background in Scouting, but always with middle-class children. There, he encountered boys and girls with different needs than those he had met until then. "They were kids who were very resilient to pain, but they found life outside the city a mountain to be reckoned with," he explains. His work then included such basic tasks as finding sleeping bags for summer camps with minimal conditions: "Twelve or fourteen teenagers slept in tents with newspaper as insulation. Some had never left Barcelona. One slept on the street with his father, and another had just arrived." Those first summers at the Casal would mark him forever: "It was a very significant shock. They didn't have the opportunity for recreation or a listening group. They didn't have the materials they needed. Nor any vision of the mountains. Everything seemed very bizarre to them," Canet explains.