The Monumental Citizen Attention Office, on Sicília street in Barcelona, has experienced this Friday moments of tension and fights among people who were queuing to process regularization documentation. The situation has forced the Mossos d'Esquadra and the Guàrdia Urbana to intervene to order the accesses and contain the agglomeration outside the municipal facility.
The opening of the office has been delayed until 11:00 hours. The reason has been the concentration of people and several attempts to skip the queue, at a point that from early morning already presented a notable accumulation of users waiting to be served.
A queue that surrounded several streets of the surroundings
The queue has extended from number 216 of Sicília street and has come to surround Gran Via and Sardenya street up to Diputació street. In the area, discussions and shoves have been experienced in full wait, within a day marked by the saturation of the service.
Some of the people gathered had been waiting for about 12 hours awaiting their turn. Others had spent the night on the street to try to secure attention in one of the offices enabled for this type of procedures without prior appointment.
Distribution of numbers to order the wait
The OAC workers have distributed numbers to organize access. The people who this Friday were still at the door will not be attended today, although the number given guarantees them a turn for the coming days. With this measure, an attempt has been made to reduce the tension generated by the wait and by the uncertainty among those who feared being left out.
The OAC Monumental is one of the four offices enabled in Barcelona to carry out these procedures without prior appointment, a circumstance that has concentrated a strong demand in different points of the city.
Similar scenes in other points of Barcelona
The pressure has not been limited to the office on Sicília street. In Sant Miquel square, queues of up to a kilometer have also been registered, with people who have come to spend the night in sleeping bags to keep their position. This same week, a similar episode had already occurred in the SAIER office on Tarragona street.
The day once again puts the focus on the saturation at the service points linked to regularization procedures in Barcelona, with long waits, queues that overflow public space and the need for police presence to maintain order at the accesses.