The old Simon factory, on Barcelona street in Girona, is once again in the center of current events after the fires declared in recent days inside an abandoned enclosure that for years has been experiencing police actions, departures of emergency services, and neighborhood complaints.
Inside the warehouses live homeless people in precarious conditions. The situation is not new at this point of the southern entrance of the city, where the police frequently deploy devices to count the people who stay overnight there or to locate some resident of the compound who allegedly would have committed some crime.
A degraded space with habitual presence of emergencies
The recent fires have once again put the focus on facilities that have become a sensitive point in Girona. Part of the people currently living in the old Simon factory have moved from the old Aconda factory in Flaçà. There is also mobility between these warehouses and the occupied block on Ferran Puig avenue, another of the city's conflictive enclaves.
The accumulation of interventions over years has consolidated the old Simon as one of the most problematic spaces in the vicinity of Barcelona street. To this is added the deterioration of some abandoned warehouses in which the presence of homeless people is maintained continuously.
The City Council started demolitions last September
In late September last year, the Girona City Council began to demolish subsidiarily six warehouses located between numbers 148 and 152 of Barcelona street, in an area near the old Simon factory. The action had an approximate cost of 400,000 euros.
The council justified that intervention due to structural and safety problems in the facilities. That demolition was proposed as a first step within the transformation of Girona's southern entrance, with the plan to also act on the rest of the warehouses in the medium term.
Property recovery and eviction underway
The City Council has underway the ex officio recovery process of the property with the aim of being able to transfer it to the Generalitat. The intended destination for that space is the future Institut Ermessenda.
In early March, the council approved initiating the process to evict 25 homeless people who habitually spend the night in the warehouses. Following this Friday's fire, the municipal government has explained that Social Services has been monitoring for months the people occupying the warehouse, in parallel with the urban planning and administrative actions opened regarding the premises.
The evolution of this space is now marked by a double urgency, the social and the urbanistic, in an enclave of Barcelona street that continues generating constant interventions while the municipal forecast to definitively recover the warehouses advances.