To make space for the new buildings around La Sagrera, others disappear. More than 2,000 of the new homes will be built in an area known as the Prim sector, in La Verneda, where the first to become history will be a large complex of industrial warehouses and a peculiar car park, like future urban ghosts spending their last days watching the construction work pass by. Along the way, the exposed brick blocks of Santander street wind with a chromatic uniformity that is only broken by the laundry hanging out from various balconies. With the heat, it will be more than dry in a few minutes.
Driven away by the temperature, there is no one on the street, nor in the parks, only those who have no choice but to be there: workers from the La Sagrera construction sites, three cleaning service operators, and a couple of boys pushing carts to collect scrap metal from the shacks that pile up, ironically, next to the nearby Pont del Treball Digne.
Between the buildings, a large fenced plot, locked with a padlock and "private property" signs, surrounds what one day must have been a playground, now faded and solitary under the sun, while some bewildered tomatoes grow on plants that seem to have sprouted spontaneously.
Another man appears on the scene on Rambla Prim, carrying three small boxes that he rests on a walker. Carefully, he takes various utensils from one of them: a toothbrush, a spray bottle, and a rag or two. Curiosity gets the better of me and I approach, as he takes out the other two boxes, which hide two songbirds. He begins to clean the cages with the meticulousness of someone who has done something hundreds of times. "I often come out to clean them," he explains.
I take the opportunity to ask him exactly which buildings are going to be demolished in the Prim sector; he has heard that they will start with some industrial warehouses and the car park. He has been in the neighborhood for five decades, and has seen it change completely with the La Sagrera works: "And you'll see it change even more now, when the works are finished."
— I don't think I'll live to see it—, he jokes, or not, as he meticulously cleans the second cage.
Crossing Santander street again, the area that will see the first demolitions of the Prim sector unfolds up to Via Trajana and Pont del Treball. I ask at a mechanical workshop, and they tell me that the expert on the subject is the industrial warehouse's security guard, but he is on vacation. They cannot help with directions to find the first warehouses that will disappear, but they ask for something before I continue searching: they want a photo. Of course.
A few meters away, the several doors of an apparently older exposed-brick warehouse reveal people working with wood and other materials. A woman who is busy in one of them confirms it: these warehouses will be history in a few months. And, far from being disused, she tells me that they operate as a shared industrial workshop. She has been working there for four years, and now it's time to look for new spaces.
The same applies to the nearly 200 people who work in the warehouses. They do so through the company TMDC, as Lucas López clarifies from the company. The workshops are open to both professionals and individuals, and provide access to all types of machinery to work with any imaginable material, such as metal, wood, ceramics, and plastic.
Lucas says that TMDC has been operating in Barcelona for seven years, and has been in La Verneda since 2018. "We knew from the beginning that all this was affected, but it is still painful to see something you have seen grow disappear." They have already seen four warehouses vanish, which were demolished in January, and will move in the autumn to a new location, in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, which will triple their current space to 15,000 square meters.
Full of machines, material, projects, and ideas, the warehouses that are still standing now look at an empty plot, where no trace remains of the four warehouses already demolished, as a prelude to what is to come. Soon nothing will remain: the demolitions are planned for 2027.
Upon exiting, the works for the new collector separate the warehouses that will be demolished from the car park that will also disappear. A few steps further, the Pet Funeral Home looks from the other side of Via Trajana at the affected sector, which it narrowly escapes. Through veterinarians, families can opt for this service to say goodbye to their pets before cremation, a worker explains to me from the reception of the facility. Outside, all is silence, except for the construction work, with workers sweating in the sun and drawing the path to the affected car park.
The car park is a large plot of land that is full not only of cars, but also of vans and large trucks. "People even come from Badalona and Santa Coloma to park here," explains its guard. When it disappears, they don't know where they will leave their vehicles. "Before there were three car parks like this around here, and this is the last one. They'll have to go all the way to the Zona Franca, or who knows," he speculates from an air-conditioned booth. From there, he points out something that will survive in the Prim sector, and that will be recovered from abandonment: the Can Riera farmhouse, cornered between the car park and a football field that he says will also disappear. After years of deterioration and completely hidden behind fences eaten by brambles, the farmhouse is destined to become the nerve center of the future neighborhood. Some leave, few stay, and others resurface as La Verneda transforms.