The City Council will stop the conversion of the Ona de Gràcia bookstore into a 24-hour supermarket

BarcelonaExactly one year ago, the Vila de Gràcia in Barcelona confirmed that it was definitively losing the Ona bookstore, one of the most iconic in the area. These days, the neighborhood has seen how the commemoration of that event coincided with the opening of a new establishment that, unintentionally, has become a symbol of how the city's commercial landscape is transforming. In the premises where the bookstore used to be, at 217 Gran de Gràcia street, a new 24-hour supermarket is now open.

The inauguration of this new self-service shop is not only controversial because it adds a new establishment of this type to the deluge that has already opened in recent years in the city, which has about 1,300. It is also because it arrives even though last May the municipal government approved suspending the granting of new licenses for self-service and convenience stores that can open 24 hours for one year.

For this reason, the city council soon sent inspectors to verify what had happened. They detected two main irregularities: that construction work had been carried out without a permit and that the business did not have a license for the activity it was carrying out. Municipal sources explain that following those inspections, the Gràcia district has initiated the procedures to order the cessation of the activity. However, the closure of the establishment may still take a few weeks while the administrative processes derived from these files are completed.

When it announced the one-year suspension of licenses last May, the city council assured that it was working on a "global and coordinated regulation at a city scale" that goes beyond the land use plans that have been made in specific areas of the city such as in areas of Ciutat Vella or Sant Martí.

More questioned establishments

Beyond the case of the former Ona bookstore in Gràcia, this week at the City Council there has also been talk of other controversial self-service stores. In response to a request from Esquerra, the fifth deputy mayor, Raquel Gil, explained that the council could also close another 24-hour grocery store recently opened on Carrer de la Creu Coberta because it does not have the appropriate license to carry out this activity.

On the other hand, Gil explained that two other establishments in the Eixample that the republicans had put in their sights –at Marina and València and at Girona and Mallorca– can indeed open because they have licenses obtained long before the moratorium was approved and which until now were not being used.

The council highlights that, in parallel with the temporary suspension of licenses, the Barcelona City Council has continued to intensify inspection efforts to ensure compliance with regulations in this type of establishment through ordinary reviews and multi-inspections. One of the most relevant was carried out two years ago in the Eixample and uncovered substandard housing within these establishments.

The rise of this type of establishment came about following the suspension –and subsequent annulment– by the Constitutional Court of the articles of the Catalan commerce law that regulated commercial hours. The magistrates ruled that the state law prevailed, which allows full freedom of hours for all establishments with less than 300 square meters of surface area; in practice, the majority of businesses.