Mariola, the Juan Carlos Blocs, and a pitched battle against the Mossos d'Esquadra in Lleida

BarcelonaA "tumultuous" brawl between 200 residents on Sunday night in the Mariola neighborhood of Lleida ended with six Mossos d'Esquadra officers injured, one of whom is still hospitalized with neck pain and a fractured forehead. After receiving three calls for incidents on Júpiter Street, the two ARRO units that responded were attacked by the same residents, who were tearing at each other with objects and stones, causing serious injuries to the officers. One of them, in fact, required 20 stitches. "A tragedy, injured officers and split heads," an ARRO officer explained to ARA. The Mossos arrived because of a fight between families living in the neighborhood and ended up receiving the wrath of the neighbors: everyone turned on them. One of the main theories is that the trigger for the fight was a conflict over drug trafficking.

Mariola has always been a neighborhood with a stigma in Lleida. "Wow! Mariola," Laura's friends are surprised when she tells them she lives there, just a few meters from the street where the incidents occurred on Sunday night. But she has never had any security problems. "All of Lleida is the same," she assures, to downplay the stigma attached to the neighborhood where she settled nearly two decades ago. However, fame has preceded Mariola for decades. Although it lacks the renown of Mina de San Adrián, Sant Cosme in El Prat de Llobregat, or Fuente de la Pólvora in Girona, Mariola has always generated a certain amount of suspicion among many Lleida residents. "Bad place," says Alexandre, a resident of the capital of Segrià, when he hears about it. However, after Sunday's incident, both the Paeria and the Catalan police force tried not to create alarm or criminalize the area, claiming that these were "one-off" incidents. However, the head of the basic area of Segrià, Xavier Ribelles, admitted that it was the "most serious" situation he had experienced since he landed in Ponent in 2011.

During the last few years, the Paeria has focused on recovering the historic center of the city, highly degraded areas where drug trafficking and occupation are common, and where during the fruit harvest season hundreds of people, mainly from Africa and other parts of Spain, gather to look for work. Mariola is not part of this old town and has different dynamics than the historic center of Lleida. It is a peripheral neighborhood, to the west of the city, built in the 1960s to accommodate people arriving from southern Spain. The epicenter, famous throughout the city, is the so-called Bloques Juan Carlos (Juan Carlos Blocks). This is a group of socially protected buildings where several Roma families settled. They were built during the Franco regime and were named after the Bourbon when he was still a prince. The attacks on the officers occurred next to these historic blocks, although in recent years there have also been some problems with coexistence because in a nearby area, at the foot of Gardeny Hill, people from outside of Spain have settled, occupying a group of low-rise houses in very poor condition.

In 2019, the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) raided Mariola against drug trafficking—both cocaine and marijuana. Six people were arrested during the police operation, one of them for attacking law enforcement officers. A plantation with 1,800 marijuana plants was dismantled during the operation.

La Paeria condemned Sunday's events, and the deputy mayor and councilor for security, Cristina Morón, assured that the city council, led by the socialist Fèlix Larrosa, will implement an improvement plan that will include urban and social measures.