Author: Bernat Dedéu

Source: elnacional.cat

Yesterday, we learned that for the second consecutive year, Barcelona is losing inhabitants (the municipal register is 1,639,981 people, 1.2% less than in 2021) and that the birth rate recorded this year in the capital is the lowest since 1939. This news confirms an intuition shared by most Barcelonians: we increasingly hear about more friends, acquaintances, and familiar faces leaving the city, tired of the rising prices in housing and basic necessities. First, it was my generation, who fled the Eixample to set up their lives in the surrounding areas, where they have better access to public services, happily buying a country house for the price they paid in rent. Now it’s also young people, who are leaving Barcelona (and this is more worrying) because they find the city not only expensive but also harmful to health and incredibly boring.

It’s normal for the Oficina Municipal de Dades to blame this exodus on the impact of COVID and migration balance. I won’t deny the effects of the pandemic and the decline in newcomers to the city; however, I insist, just listen to most of my exiled friends to understand that we are at the beginning of an escape that will increase over the next decades. Let’s admit it; today, Barcelona is an expensive, highly uncomfortable city that doesn’t stand out in any of the major areas of urban excellence. I am more of a Barcelonian than the statue of Santa Eulàlia, and in forty-three years, I have only allowed myself to live in a neighborhood of Barcelona they call New York; but if you ask me why to live in the capital of Catalonia in 2022 (and moreover, to dare to have children), I’m at a loss for words. Whether people like it or not, today Barcelona is a place to flee from as quickly as possible.

If nothing changes, and I’m highly pessimistic, Barcelona risks becoming a completely deserted and old city. All of this is not a coincidence. For many years, we have been governed by an administration with the malicious intention of impoverishing the city, and it has managed to – quite impressively – reverse the good management of the PSC mayors. As always happens with communists, Ada Colau has not created a city where the rich are less rich but where the poor are poorer, and the middle class is a relic of the past. I don’t blame her; her electoral program was based on making Barcelona more Spanish and turning it into just another provincial capital of the kingdom. And that’s what she has done. For the third consecutive year, less than half of Barcelonians (48.8%) were born in the city, a figure that will increase with the exodus of Catalans from the capital and the gradual decline in families.

Barcelona is an expensive, highly uncomfortable city that doesn’t stand out in any of the major areas of urban excellence

This last fact also implies a significant corollary. For some years, Catalan hasn’t been spoken in Barcelona. The service rates in our language in sectors such as healthcare or local commerce make you want to jump off one of the nauseating towers of the Sagrada Familia. You don’t need many studies or statistics to know this. I live in Ciutat Vella, a neighborhood where ancestral commerce is holding on against the attack of stores and establishments designed solely to satisfy increasingly tacky tourism, where Catalan is becoming a relic akin to the walls surrounding the Cathedral. All this is even more depressing if we think of the opposition to Colau’s policies, so far led by Grandpa Ernest, and very soon, if the convergents definitely return, we’ll add Godfather Xavier. New blood and new policies… well.

I warned a long time ago that Barcelona could not afford an amateur administration nor a Spanish mayor. But back then, you told me I was too radical, too intolerant, that I could say the same thing differently… and now you’ll have to swallow those things while you pack your bags to move to a place where your highest aspiration will be to wake up with the rooster’s crow and grow splendid tomatoes. There was some politician who dared to tell you the truth, but his intelligence must have hurt your pride. Your choice. Here you have the result. I will be very sorry to leave this desert of godfathers that my beloved rose of fire will soon become. But it is inevitable; we will have to pack up again and see if in the American grid there is a chance to be reborn.