Not just the HEAT

You have to con­tend with more than just the heat if, like me, you are con­demned to spend your en­tire sum­mer at home in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal. Liv­ing in a res­i­den­tial area of cen­tral Barcelona, I know that when the sum­mer rolls round, it’s time to get out of the big city and head for ei­ther a north­ern coun­try, the coast or the moun­tains in order to avoid the heat.

How­ever, hav­ing this year been un­able to beat a re­treat for var­i­ous rea­sons, it was time to face the music. And I use the term wisely, the new phe­nom­e­non of tourists’ music blar­ing out of their rented apart­ments from early evening until all hours of the morn­ing now ac­com­pa­ny­ing one of the more tra­di­tional fea­tures of a sum­mer in cen­tral Barcelona, that of hav­ing to lis­ten to other peo­ple’s TV sets — usu­ally broad­cast­ing chat shows with at­ten­tion-starved ’celebri­ties’ scream­ing at each other — dur­ing the day­time. And this dur­ing a pe­riod when if you don’t have air-con­di­tion­ing — I don’t — you’re forced to have your win­dows wide open 24 hours a day.

I say the lat­ter fea­ture is typ­i­cal of cen­tral Barcelona in the sum­mer, but in fact when­ever I’ve hol­i­dayed on camp­sites in Cat­alo­nia dur­ing the sum­mer I’ve also found that fam­i­lies are quite happy to have du­elling TVs blar­ing out from their chalet porches, as if they have sim­ply upped sticks and moved their city home to a place by the sea or in the moun­tains, seem­ingly obliv­i­ous to the nat­ural en­vi­ron­ment of rivers and trees or beaches and sea water around them. So, lis­ten­ing to blar­ing TVs and other peo­ple’s music is ac­tu­ally a fea­ture of sum­mer in gen­eral here rather than just in cen­tral Barcelona.

But it was the for­mer prob­lem that be­came the big issue for me this sum­mer. And I know I’m not alone in this, as Barcelona City Coun­cil now has a web­site where you can, the­o­ret­i­cally at least, check whether your neigh­bour is rent­ing out their apart­ment il­le­gally, i.e. with­out a li­cence, and lodge a com­plaint to get them closed down. The rea­son I use the word ’the­o­ret­i­cally’ is that, as the third straight week of par­ty­ing en­sued — al­beit with dif­fer­ent sets of tourists each time — I vis­ited the afore­men­tioned web­site to try and com­plain about the noise and it re­quires that you put in the exact ad­dress of the res­i­dence in ques­tion. Even though I tried to enter my neigh­bour’s ad­dress to see if they had a li­cence to rent out to tourists, the search fa­cil­ity did not ap­pear to work, and didn’t even have the rel­e­vant ad­dress listed on the web­site, as if the flat didn’t ac­tu­ally exist. All very frus­trat­ing. I twice picked up the phone to call the po­lice to com­plain, be­fore think­ing bet­ter of it, de­cid­ing that I didn’t want to be dis­cussing all this with a uni­formed of­fi­cer at 3am; I would rather just put a pil­low over my head and hope the tourists dis­ap­peared to­mor­row (they didn’t). My con­clu­sion? Do my ut­most to en­sure that in late July and early Au­gust I am never again forced to bear the noise pol­lu­tion and heat of cen­tral Barcelona.