MADRID – Even before the biggest snowfall in Madrid in half a century caused part of its roof to collapse, this month, Manuela Reyes Flores and her family were without electricity and running water when winter started in their poor neighborhood outside the Spanish capital .
So it was just another level of misery for them and thousands of other residents of the neighborhood, Cañada Real, when the great blizzard of two weeks ago covered Madrid with a foot and a half of snow. The capital’s region was paralyzed and on Tuesday Madrid was declared a disaster zone.
“We have never had an easy life,” said Reyes Flores, who settled in Cañada Real two decades ago as part of his large Roma community. She and her family had to light fires to keep warm, cook food and heat water for bathing.
“We had to build our own house and we always did our best to fix things without spending any money,” she said.
“But I can say that this place went from disastrous to simply unbearable,” she added, as she placed a bucket under a leak in the hole in her roof caused by the weight of fresh snow.
Cañada Real, with about 8,000 inhabitants, is one of the largest neighborhoods in Europe devastated by poverty. Although part of the area is filled with brick and mortar houses, at least half of the people live under corrugated roofs and canvas, which is also used instead of glass windows.
The neighborhood has been a political football for decades, with various layers of government and different municipalities sharing responsibility for a vast expanse of land. Amid political slowness, about 15 non-governmental organizations intervened to help the most vulnerable in Cañada Real. The number of Spanish aid workers has also increased since the beginning of the pandemic, because travel restrictions have prevented them from working outside Spain.
Olga San Martín, co-founder of Olvidados, a small aid organization, visited Bosnia in December to distribute winter clothes in refugee camps.
“I consider life in Cañada Real as horrendous as in Bosnia, except that it looks even more shocking and shameful, because we allow it to happen in the capital of Spain and within the European Union,” she said after researching the damage from the snowstorm.
In 2017, lawmakers agreed to dismantle part of Cañada Real and move thousands of residents to subsidized apartments in Madrid. But only 105 of these apartments have been made available.
In October, the concessionaire Naturgy cut off electricity to most of Cañada Real, saying residents were making intensive, unregulated and unsafe use of their electricity, although the area had only four official customer accounts.
The power cut led to clashes between police and residents. The clashes intensified when the police entered, detained a dozen people and destroyed several batches of marijuana.
In December, a group of United Nations experts asked Spanish authorities to restore electricity, mainly to protect the approximately 1,800 children living in the region.
“You can’t punish an entire population for the crimes of some,” said Javier Baeza, a priest who regularly visits Cañada Real to help his residents. “The political treatment of Cañada Real can only be called terrible.”
The City of Madrid, responding to questions sent by e-mail, described Cañada Real as a challenge and not a failure, noting that its relocation plan had received “a strong boost last year”.
He also noted that the Cañada Real problem goes back decades.
“If the solution had been easy, it would have been resolved, because during all this time, in all administrations, there were people who were really concerned about the situation there,” said the city.
Cañada Real was once a way for farmers to cross Spain in search of fresh pasture for their sheep. However, from the 1960s onwards, Madrid’s industrial expansion convinced families to transform the land into vegetable gardens and, finally, live on it.
Over the years, as real estate developers occupied other impoverished neighborhoods and evictions were accelerating in other parts of Madrid, the population of Cañada Real increased. Beginning in the 1990s, migrants arrived in large numbers, mainly from Morocco and Romania.
A local landmark is a church where drug dealers and users gather and smoke heroin in the sight of the policemen patrolling the area. The police say they intervene only in an emergency, if there is violence or if someone is in critical health.
Many residents eagerly await the keys to the promised subsidized apartments so they can move on. But some have mixed feelings about leaving, worried about having to pay rent and possible tensions with new neighbors.
“We all know each other here, but I really don’t think that people who live anywhere else in Madrid would love to have a Roma family next door,” said Miguel Maya, who collects and sells scrap metal, like many in the Roma community.
Instead of leaving, some residents want the authorities to invest in basic infrastructure and legalize their long-standing presence there.
Carmen Carbonell Escudero, 68, lives in Cañada Real with her husband. Even though they have no proof of ownership, she said the couple paid € 20,000, about $ 24,300, to buy the abandoned house from its previous occupant.
“Of course, I knew we were buying something illegal here, but how many people much richer than me now have a beautiful home that they never got a proper license for?” Said Mrs. Carbonell Escudero. “In Spain, if you wait long enough, what was illegal could become legal.”
Eugenio García-Calderón, an engineer who previously supplied solar energy to people in the Brazilian Amazon, said he came to Cañada Real after his power was cut. The flow of emergency aid was welcome, he said, but “nothing good can really happen here until we have a sustainable model, something that makes people self-reliant rather than relying on outside aid”.