CITY TOURS FOR THE SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS
A glimpse into the life of Barcelona’s homeless
One recent glorious Sunday morning in Barcelona, my friend Elies and I are walking down the Rambla to meet our tour guide in front of the ornate 19th-century Liceu opera house. It’s 11:30 a.m., and tourists are swarming the historic promenade, sitting down for an early lunch, armed with selfie sticks and maps to study.
We spot Jaume Rodriguez Vogt, a tall, friendly looking man of about 50. He’s dressed in a red T-shirt, baggy jeans and yellow flip-flops, holding a folder with Hidden City Tours printed on it.
I thought Jaume might start the tour with some information about the history of the opera house or its architecture, but he leads us instead to the entrance of a nearby bank. Flies are swarming. It smells faintly of urine. We spend a few minutes making introductions until Elies finally asks, “Sorry, but why are we standing here?”
“Ah,” Jaume says, turning to face the ATMs in the bank’s anteroom. “During the crisis, the banks were tolerant. As long as you left things clean and didn’t leave wine bottles around, they let people sleep here during the winter.”
This is our first hint that this won’t be any ordinary city tour. As the name suggests, Hidden City shows visitors a side of Barcelona that most would prefer to ignore, by offering a glimpse into how the city’s 3,000 homeless residents experience daily life in one of the world’s most visited tourist destinations. It isn’t a pretty picture, but the experience highlights our shared humanity in a way your average bus tour could never hope to match.
When former market research consultant Lisa Grace found herself out of work in 2012, she went looking for a change. She launched Hidden City Tours in Barcelona two years later, after reading an article about a similar endeavour in London.
With its 80-hour training program, Hidden City employs as tour guides a handful of people, like Jaume, who have experienced homelessness in the city.
Hidden City attracts socially conscious travellers, and Grace says that the guides’ personal stories strike a chord with visitors.
“I don’t like the word ‘homeless,’ ” Jaume says as he guides us off the Rambla and into the medieval streets of the Raval. The son of a German nurse and a Spanish doctor, Jaume worked as a policeman, a TV producer and a taxi driver until back problems prevented him from spending long hours behind the wheel. He resorted to picking up trash, but when the global financial crisis hit, that job wasn’t bringing in enough to pay the rent. Before he was evicted, he left his apartment and started sleeping among the marble statues and gold-plated fountains in Ciutadella Park.
“I was scared I’d become one of those smelly addicts with a beard and dirty clothes,” he says. “I realized almost anyone can get into this situation.” The economic crisis took a massive toll on Spain, where unemployment reached an unprecedented 27 per cent in 2013 and some 350,000 people have been forced from their homes. Complicating matters, about half of those who have become homeless in Barcelona suffered from a mental illness, according to a 2010 study.
Jaume slept in the park for three months before a city social-services worker brought him to a shelter; soon after, he met Grace and started training to become a guide. He says the experience changed his ideas about what homelessness looked like. One of his Hidden City co-workers has a university education, for example, and most speak several languages. Jaume speaks English, Spanish, Catalan and German fluently.
He takes us past the Maritime Museum, which draws visitors with its reproductions of 16thcentury galleons. But to those who have experienced homelessness, it is perhaps better known for its proximity to a controversial social service called a narcosala, or “drug room,” where addicts can get high in a secure space that is monitored by doctors.
“It’s important they don’t use in the street,” Jaume says.
“The day is really long when you’re living on the street, even if you’re not an addict,” Jaume says as he leads us up a narrow street, past a grassy area where a group of men sits surrounded by shopping carts. Younger men use the carts to scrape together a meagre living collecting scrap metal. But walking 24 to 32 kilometres a day while pushing a cart wasn’t an option for Jaume, who was in his late 40s when he found himself sleeping in the park.
“What did I do? Something much easier,” he says. “I made soap bubbles.” Longing for an activity to fill his days, Jaume met a Czech couple who taught him to entertain kids in the park for tips. On a good day, he earned about 20 euros.
Just when the tour seems like it might be a thinly veiled public service announcement for Barcelona’s social-services agencies, Jaume pipes up with some fun, practical tips, too. He recommends that we come back in the evening for a drink at Bar Marsella, one of the city’s oldest watering holes, and points out an under-the-radar flamenco bar where dancers perform on Saturday nights and the cover charge is only four euros.
Between Hidden City and his gig as a hotel shuttle driver, Jaume now earns enough money to pay rent on an apartment that he shares with two friends. His father, a doctor who lives in Barcelona, still doesn’t know about his stint on the streets.
I was scared I’d become one of those smelly addicts with a beard and dirty clothes. I realized almost anyone can get into this situation. Jaume Rodriguez Vogt, Hidden City tour guide