Friday, March 29

Santiago tapia an area used by homeless people to avoid their presence in an access for tourists


Barely 400 meters separate the Cathedral of Santiago from the tourist bus dock and the entrance to the car park on Xoán XXIII Avenue. In this area, the upper platform, with views of Mount Pedroso and the official residence of the president of the Xunta, acts as a visor over part of the lower level, which is collected and sheltered from the rain and which became the usual place for spend the night of several homeless people. The City Council has just started some works to wall off that area with the intention that the presence of this group does not interfere with the arrival of tourists to the area on buses or in their private vehicles.

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The local government, led by the socialist Xosé Sánchez Bugallo, does not want the first sight of the thousands of visitors that the Galician capital receives daily to be that of the tents, sleeping bags and cardboard in which a group of less than a dozen people. The works to raise the wall have not dissuaded all of them in the first days and some have spent the last few nights there.

It is not the first time that local officials have tried to avoid the image of homeless people on the very edge of the old area of ​​Compostela. In 2013, with a PP government in the City Hall, some planters were installed to try to prevent passage, but those who frequented the docks to take shelter at night looked for other points of the same structure to take shelter. The measure is recalled by the municipal group of Compostela Aberta -in the government in the previous legislature and now in the opposition-, which also charges against Sánchez Bugallo’s decision to wall up this refuge area. The municipal government has not responded to questions from this newsroom on this matter.

For the councilor of Compostela Aberta Marta Lois, the intervention shows “how close the PSOE is to Bugallo from the right”. The PP and the socialists defended the measure in the Heritage Advisory Commission in which it was raised, adds the councilor and ensures that the local government “openly recognizes that these works only aim to improve the image of the city before tourists”. The problem, she says, is that “at no time does she think about improving the situation of homeless people, who are not going to disappear because the place they use to sleep is covered up.”

Lois points out that the planter initiative “clearly didn’t fix the homeless situation” and this one won’t either. She makes it ugly that the approach to the problem is aesthetic: “We are talking about a question of social justice; what is important is the situation of homeless people who, if they sleep in Xoán XXIII, it is because there are still no valid options for them”. The councilor defends the proposal that Compostela Aberta had promoted from the local government in the previous legislature to create a municipal center for comprehensive care for the homeless.

The Xoán XXIII dock is chosen by a group of people to spend the night for having a covered area that protects them from the rain and wind and also for access to public toilets. It is not the only area of ​​the Compostela capital where cardboard and sleeping bags are seen at nightfall. Other homeless people sleep in areas such as the Valle Inclán street bus dock or under the arcades of some of the squares in the old part of the city.

The exact number of homeless people living in Santiago de Compostela is not known. The calculations of Cáritas, one of the organizations that participates in social programs, pointed out 10 years ago that in the Galician capital some 200 people slept in the open every night. However, a 2017 study included in the Xunta’s Care Plan for the Homeless 2017-2023 estimated the figure in the Galician capital at 40 and placed it as the second city, after Vigo, with the highest proportion of homeless people. in this situation in the community, almost four out of every 10,000.



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