The weariness of the neighbors of the center of Ibiza grows before what they describe as an unstoppable degradation of the pedestrian walkways located a few meters from the port. What should be one of the most cared for and walkable areas of Vila has become, they say, a space taken over by drug use, dirt and lack of police presence.
Just a few weeks ago, La Voz de Ibiza published the video of a neighbor confronting two people who, according to him, were taking drugs in front of his house. “Not at the door of my house,” he shouted at them. Today that neighbor no longer lives there. “I was sorry, but I can’t watch them urinate or do certain things in the doorway and keep quiet. It’s no place for a two-year-old,” he explains, referring to the boy who lives with him. “They have banned playing ball in the area, but it seems valid to do drugs or set up an ‘after’ with cardboard boxes.”
“This has become a Far West.”
A merchant who has a gastronomic establishment on a pedestrian street in the area summarizes the panorama as follows: “This is the Far West. There is garbage, people taking drugs, people living on the street and total neglect by the City Hall. We have to continually call the police or municipal agents. It is unsustainable.
A neighbor who has lived in the center of Vila for four decades describes a similar scene. “One night my husband found a woman sleeping inside the gate, she had even brought her bicycle. It’s such a central neighborhood and so abandoned…. The buildings have to lock the gates at nine o’clock at night”.
The person claims to have witnessed people “sleeping, shitting, cooking in the parking lot”.
“These passages, with the climate we have, are a perfect haven for sleeping. But it is no longer just homeless people: there is drug use, theft and constant filth. Shopkeepers have been robbed. The whole center of Ibiza seems to have been taken over by these people, the neighborhood has been degraded”, adds the woman.
In many cases, merchants have had to put up some sort of fencing at the entrances so that unwanted visitors do not stay there for hours.
“Every day one who pees, another who sticks.”
Another neighbor, who also wishes to remain anonymous, has been living in the area for two years and says: “Every day someone shits, someone pisses, someone hits, someone throws glass bottles. They do what they want. It seems to me to be in the Third World“.
He says he has called the police more than once and has been told they can’t do anything. “One even told me to go at night and beat them up.”
“That little jewel has become a shitty place.”
Nieves Lacoba has known the area since 1986. She lived there for decades, but ended up leaving. “I thought I had a little jewel. Now I realize it’s a shitty place. I tried to rent my apartment, and the tenant, with a small child, left after three months: there were junkies in the doorway. Ibiza is an island where we pay and contribute a lot, and next to the port we have a place where you can’t even walk. It’s terrible,” he complains.
Lacoba, who claims to support the current local government, launches a direct criticism: “In these everyday things, total failure. It doesn’t seem normal to me that people pee or prick themselves in the street and nobody does anything.
City Hall’s version
Sources of the Ibiza Town Hall consulted by this media assure that the neighborhood complaints they receive “are mainly due to noise from groups of people and music in the vicinity of a bar”. They add that, “as for homeless people, when they have been warned about it the Local Police has acted, also warning Social Services”.
Neighbors, however, claim that the institutional response does not translate into real change. “In theory we have a neighborhood policeman, but you don’t see him at all,” says one neighbor. “They tell us that when they intervene, people go elsewhere. But in the end, they always come back.”
“It could be an upscale neighborhood.”
All the testimonies agree on one thing: the lost potential. “It could be a luxury neighborhood, it’s next to the port,” one of them summarizes. Today, now far from the place, he repeats it with resignation: “It’s a shame. But one gets tired of living surrounded by dirt and drugs, without anyone doing anything.
