Published on : Tuesday, May 29, 2018
The tourism industry says that if this becomes a regular occurrence during the summer, it’s going to be a problem.
Depending on who you talk to, the recent incidents at Canet de Mar, Llafranc and Calella de Palafrugell are either anecdotal, or a symptom of rising tensions in Catalan society.
Either way, organized groups from both sides of the divide are cropping up and taking action in an increasingly public manner.
“We are not fascists, although we are used to being told that we are,” says José Casado, 38, who leads a group called Els Segadors del Maresme. Created in January of this year, it has 2,600 followers on Twitter and around 50 members who go around removing yellow ribbons and other symbols left in public spaces by separatist activists.
At first they worked at night, but these days they are also doing so in broad daylight. It is this group that was accused by separatists of injuring three of their own activists at Canet del Mar, when the latter tried to prevent Casado and his aides from pulling out crosses at the beach.
Casado says that they took the crosses to the local police precinct and did not touch anyone, and that they follow a rule of “not talking to them because we will never find common ground, they’re stuck in their own loop.”
Marc Jiménez, a local councilor for the far-left CUP party who denounced attacks by Casado’s group at Canet de Mar, did not reply to this newspaper’s requests for information.
The beach display at Canet del Mar was set up by members of the pro-independence grassroots group Committees to Defend the Republic (CDR), which has conducted other public acts of protest in the past, such as blocking roads and tampering with highway toll booth barriers.
The yellow cross display in Mataró last Sunday was a significant step up from previous beach protests in several ways. For the first time, separatist activists had announced it ahead of time, rather than showing up by surprise. And Mataró is a city of 126,000 residents, not a small village.
Asked if things are going to keep escalating, Mayor Bote said that he would keep urging residents to be good neighbours to one another. “I think that the majority feeling is a desire for things to go back to normal. I want to believe that this will not keep happening in the summer,” he said.
Instead, regular citizens who reacted to the crosses in Calella de Palafrugell have been feeling the fallout from the social media exposure after separatist activists shared videos.
This man says he called the police but that they did nothing. The passive attitude of the authorities has been a constant feature: either they don’t know how to deal with it, or else they tacitly support the separatist displays. Arenys de Munt has become the first Catalan municipality to forbid removing yellow ribbons from public areas. Most towns in Girona and the Costa Brava are pro-independence, and it is noticeable that all the beach protests have taken place in this part of the coast, where tourism from Spain only represents 8% of the total and most beachgoers hail from France, Britain and other European countries, according to industry figures.
Juan Carlos Bisbé, the owner of a restaurant in Llafranc, says he is worried about the area’s image. “They’re painting a picture of Catalonia that is not real; we’re not beating each other up over here,” he says. “Everyone thinks whatever they want to think, there is no violence, but people are being frightened.”
In other words, the cost of offending national tourists is low, while international publicity is ensured. Instead, the confrontation has broken out among Catalans themselves.