The morning after the eviction from the Badalona (Barcelona) warehouse, where a hundred people, mostly migrants, were forcibly removed on Thursday, dawned with low temperatures. About thirty of the occupants slept in the square that extends in front of the old factory, an island between state-of-the-art apartment complexes. The councilor for the social area of the Badalona City Council, David Torrents (Junts), explained that his department had signed an emergency decree to provide nearly 30 members of the ship with a "housing alternative" for a month. This is approximately a third of those who until Thursday had been its inhabitants, many of them from a factory burned down in 2020, also in Badalona, in an incident that resulted in five fatalities.
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The greatest fear among those who camped there was being identified —due to their irregular situation in Spain—, but around four in the afternoon, some began to move.
First to the Social Services offices, to be able to register;
and later to a shelter to which they were referred.
Registering with any administration is something that many feared from the beginning, in case it could pose a problem for their immigration status.
Sadiki (Guinea, 31 years old) was among the first to leave.
"Tonight I was cold," he said.
He had lived in the ship for five years and on the day of the eviction he managed to put his belongings in a shopping cart like the one that many of his colleagues use to transport the junk they sell and allows them to survive.
At the other end of the promenade, from early in the morning, a Badalona Urban Guard patrol watched the tents, the music and the chairs around the fire that they had lit to keep warm.
Sources from the social area of the Consistory pointed out that the priority at the moment is those who occupied the ship;
and, among these, those who are most at risk, such as the elderly, women and the youngest.
During the morning of Friday, a group from outside the ship joined the thirty people who had spent the night on the street. This triggered moments of tension between some of them. "They come to steal our things," exclaimed one of the women who slept in the plaza. Babadi (Guinea, 38 years old), an inhabitant of the ship who was able to spend Thursday night in a hostel, lamented the situation: "Some smoke, drink, shout, but not all of us are like that." Some neighbors who passed in front of the ship also complained about the situation.
Babadi, for his part, got a contract as a cook 10 days ago in Mataró, 30 minutes from the center of Barcelona, and proudly showed off his train ticket.
"Never again a ship," he said, referring to the old factory where he has lived for the last six months.
Now that he has a contract, he will try to find a room, something that those who have not been able to regularize their situation cannot access.
The entity that owns the ship, Sareb, constituted with a majority of public capital and which kept the toxic assets after the bank rescue, began to wall up the entrance, while some of its former occupants marched to their new destination.
At the other end of the promenade, past the playground, a family hung balloons against the fence of one of the buildings: they were preparing a birthday party.