Over 600 volunteers take part in homeless count on Barcelona streets

More than 600 volunteers walked through the streets of Barcelona overnight to count how many people are sleeping on the streets, as part of the count organized by the Arrels Foundation.

The organization wants to update the resources needed to deal with the situation and to find out where people removed from settlements have gone in recent weeks.

The figures will be released in the coming days, but before then, the organization expects that this year's count will see an increase in the number of people sleeping rough in the Catalan capital seen in the last count, undertaken in 2023, when an all-time high of 1,384 people were found.

Groups of volunteers took to the streets between 10pm and 2am Wednesday night into Thursday morning.

The organization's director, Beatriz Fernández, explained that the housing crisis and job insecurity are two factors "increasingly pushing more people" into homelessness.

She added that in the context of a "precarious" labor market, it is also more expensive to maintain "rooms or residential spaces", the prices of which "have also risen."

Fernández also pointed out that several homeless settlements have been evicted in recent months, such as the one in Joan Miró Park, and that this will have caused these homeless people to move to other parts of the city.

With the count, Arrels aims to quantify the problem, “because without the data it is difficult to establish the strategy of the resources needed," and also to get the public involved, through volunteers.

Cèsar Algora, a resident of La Rambla, participated as a volunteer counter for the first time, and told the Catalan News Agency that he sees "many people expelled from the system" on this border between the Raval and the Gothic Quarters.

Algora explained that in the first hour of walking the area, they found seven people; some in small groups, sheltered in boxes with their belongings, and others on benches.

For him, it is a “shame” that the city has hundreds of people living on the streets. “A big city is not a great city. Barcelona should allocate more public funds to house people, to be able to rehabilitate them and give them the living conditions they need,” he said.