Beyond the case of Pepe: X-ray of Bon Pastor
The neighborhood has undergone a profound transformation in the last fifteen years, and it still has to grow more
BarcelonaPepe's return home this Thursday after spending a week in provisional prison at can Brians has given air to the Bon Pastor neighbourhood of Barcelona. The case of this man in a wheelchair who killed a thief who wanted to rob him has altered the day-to-day lives of neighbours accustomed to living on the fringes of the city, but peacefully. For a few days, the unfortunate episode has put the spotlight on its streets, which have filled television hours with a portrait of the neighbourhood focused on security that does not explain, not by a long shot, the reality of a Bon Pastor that continues to be largely unknown to much of the rest of the city.
of this man in a wheelchair who killed a thief
A simple glance at the map confirms this condition of the city as a border. Between the limits marked by the river, the Litoral ring road, the industrial estates, and the train tracks, live nearly 16,000 people. The very extensive information bank of the Municipal Data Office (OMD) helps to create a profile. As with a good part of the neighborhoods on the Besòs axis of the city, Bon Pastor is included among the areas where residents have a lower disposable income –16,534 euros, compared to the city's average of 22,994 according to the latest published data– and also among those with the highest population born abroad.
On January 1, 2024, 39% of the neighborhood's residents were born outside the State, above the 33.7% in the overall count for Barcelona. Of these, 61.9% were from American countries –especially Honduras and Colombia–; 20.2% from Asia –mainly Pakistan–, and 9.9% from Africa, the majority of whom are Moroccan. As in a large part of the city, many have arrived in recent years. Foreign nationals were 13.2% of Bon Pastor's residents in 2017. In 2023, they were already 26.3%. A boom that has pushed the neighborhood's population to 16,000 people, about 3,500 more than eight years ago.
The Pepe case has also reopened the debate on insecurity, which often moves in the realm of perceptions. These days, in the neighborhood, there are neighbors like Carmen who leave home without valuables and frightened, alongside others, like Yolanda López herself or the president of the Bon Pastor neighborhood association, Paquita Delgado, who deny having felt more insecure in recent years. Without public data at the neighborhood level, an approximate view is given by the data from the Mossos d'Esquadra on known criminal offenses in the district as a whole. Figures that show that while in Barcelona as a whole the crime curve is going down, in Sant Andreu it has grown year after year since the pandemic, reaching 11,043 in 2025. The second highest figure in the last fifteen years and close to the 11,149 offenses in 2019.
A profound transformation
The photograph is not complete, however, without a walk through the neighborhood. Doing so alongside two of its most active residents – Paquita Delgado and Chema Fanlo– helps to understand the profound transformation that Bon Pastor has undergone, symbolized by the farewell to cheap housing. From Plaça de Vilabesòs, it is possible to go back and forth in time. To observe at the same time the musealized vestiges of these precarious constructions from 1929 – made to alleviate the lack of housing for the popular classes of the time– and the modern buildings where the residents who lived in the cheap housing have been rehoused.
Hand in hand with this process – and with the impetus that the different neighborhood plans approved by the City Council since 2015 have provided for Bon Pastor–, the neighborhood's skin has also changed. Today, walking through some of its streets is almost like entering a render, especially now that spring has begun to adorn the trees with orange, purple, and white. Delgado and Fanlo cannot hide their pride that years of neighborhood struggle have contributed to making this part of the neighborhood an example of the city's most modern urban planning, with vegetation that is also radiant during droughts thanks to irrigation systems with groundwater.
However, both emphasize that there is still a lot of work to be done. They are concerned about how to integrate the neighborhood's growth that is yet to come due to the pending urban transformations in the Mercedes and La Maquinista plots. "We could reach 20,000 residents," they point out, and they ask that the facilities that are to absorb this growth also arrive on time.