Combed, elegant, smiling, the Moroccan Abdelkrim (35 years old) learns Spanish. He reads it fluently, but he stops at each word that he doesn’t know. “What does triumphant mean?” he asks with a Latin accent acquired after making Colombian friends on social networks. Two days a week he goes to a classroom with blackboards, a handful of chairs, a dirt floor and a plastic roof located in the shanty town of Atochares, in Níjar (Almería, 31,816 inhabitants). With a degree in Geography and a diploma in Gastronomy, the lack of opportunities prompted him to get on a boat. On his fifth attempt he reached Lanzarote from El Aaiún. He passed through Málaga and ended up in Níjar. He is not the only new migrant to arrive in the last year. Others did so after their expulsion from another similar camp, Walili, demolished at the end of January 2023 and which forced a local plan to eradicate these spaces, where some 4,000 foreign people reside in this Andalusian province, a figure that is repeated in Huelva, according to calculations by Andalucía Acoge. Since then they have lived between fear and uncertainty. What if your shack is the next to fall? “The general atmosphere is one of hopelessness,” says Almeria activist Ricardo Pérez, 27 years old.
Atochares is a town made up of dozens of precarious huts. Most are built with pallets and plastic, although more and more are being built with blocks and bricks, a response to the fires that devastated part of the town in recent years. There are mud streets, cables everywhere and a fountain that serves as a neighborhood meeting. About 800 people from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa live together. It is the largest of the fifty settlements in Almería similar to this one, where the conditions are “extreme exclusion”, according to Andalucía Acoge.
They are almost invisible. And they are surrounded by the same greenhouses where their residents work – with or without papers and “under an exploitative labor model, according to a report by the NGO Ethical Consumer – for an agricultural sector in Almería that has a turnover of around 3.5 billion euros annually. No one knows for sure how to solve a paradox that has existed for more than 25 years. “It’s like sweeping the beach. You see a lot of need, but you don’t know where to start because there are no exit routes,” says María Ruiz-Clavijo, an educator at the Jesuit Service for Migrants (SJM) and one of those responsible for the classes that Abdelkrim attends. His compatriot Ismael, 25, also attends. “Living here is very hard. There is no light, there is nothing,” he says after finishing some exercises with verb tenses.
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Many of them now live with the threat of a repeat of what happened in Walili at the beginning of 2023. Then, the Civil Guard went, shanty to shanty, announcing the obligation to evict them. A few hours later, the pickaxes did not leave a single one standing. It was an initiative of the Níjar City Council – then in the hands of the PSOE – that only offered as an alternative a temporary shelter in an industrial warehouse and some prefabricated modules. The Senegalese El Hadji Lemou Diatta, 39, arrived there. There he continues a year later. “I live worse. I share a room with many people and I am 30 minutes by bike from the greenhouse where I work,” he says, tired, at the end of his work day. There are about twenty compatriots in the same situation, who have been joined by a group of about 10 Ghanaians evicted by the municipality – now in the hands of PP and Vox – a few weeks ago from a nearby camp, known as Megasa or Cortijo Mali. “Everything seemed to have calmed down, but after that demolition the fear returned,” emphasizes Khadiya Jiouak, 30 years old and an SJM educator.
Homes ready, but closed
“The City Council of Níjar acts without offering alternatives to these people, without respecting their most basic rights and ignoring the recommendations of social organizations,” six of them criticized then, such as Andalucía Acoge, which reported a few weeks ago on the situation of these substandard housing. in Brussels, the umpteenth time. The Consistory thus continues with its plan to eradicate the settlements, the details of which are unknown. “We believe that everything is going to accelerate, they are in a hurry to get them out of the way,” explain sources from a social organization. “Both Walili and Cortijo Mali were those that were on the edge of the tourist roads towards Cabo de Gata. Now they are no longer seen, but people continue to live in more dispersed and smaller settlements in the middle of nowhere,” adds Fernando Plaza, APDHA delegate. “The problem continues to grow: there are more greenhouses, more labor is needed and housing is increasingly scarce,” Plaza insists. Some of the migrants transferred to the Peninsula who, like Abdelkrim, arrived on the coasts of the Canary Islands also end up in these shacks.
Near the temporary barracks there are 62 small apartments already built and equipped in the area known as Los Grillos. They are one of the main solutions to Walili’s eviction and, although they have been announced numerous times since then, their doors remain closed. These transitional accommodations – as they are officially called – already have equipped kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms. All that remains is to pave the surroundings, a budget item that the Nijareño City Council claims it has just released. Now he promises them for April. “What difference does it make if there is land around, if they are ready we should be able to live there now,” says the Senegalese Diatta. Financed by the Junta de Andalucía and the central government, they are in the hands of the municipality, which will derive management from a social organization – it is unknown which one – so, they say, that people can reside regardless of their administrative situation.
The modules, with 166 places and where you can only reside for a maximum of 11 months, will be fenced and will have a security checkpoint that will control access. “People will not be able to leave or enter at the time they want, not everyone will be able to enter. It will have order,” says Ángeles Góngora, councilor for Social Services in Níjar. The person in charge explains that they have received a subsidy – 1.5 million – from the Junta de Andalucía to build more homes on an adjacent 4,000-meter plot, but they do not yet know how many there will be. She also recognizes that housing is a problem for anyone in the area because new ones are not built and that Sareb (Society of Assets from Bank Restructuring) has offered land for the municipality to build them. They can’t buy them, she says, “because the City Council doesn’t have enough liquidity.” The 52 lands offered come with a 40% discount as long as, according to Sareb sources, they are dedicated to social uses.
The emergence of Techô
The one who has purchased several properties from Sareb in the area is Techô, a unique SOCIMI (listed public limited company for real estate investment): it is like the rest of the companies dedicated to investing in the real estate market, but it specializes in “impact investments.” ”. “That is, when you invest money seeking profitability, but knowing that it will be lower because you are simultaneously trying to solve a problem, in our case, homelessness,” explains his CEO, Blanca Hernández. They started their work in Madrid a little over a year ago, but one of their partners, Cosentino, took them to see Almería. In Níjar alone they have invested two million euros to acquire properties that they then rent—at prices, they say, 30% below the market—to social organizations, which must dedicate them to hosting people from settlements.
Their investments have gone into six semi-detached houses and a store that Techô bought from Sareb, now managed by the Mercedarias de la Caridad sisters in San Isidro, who pay 400 euros per month for each one. In addition, there are four others purchased from a real estate fund run by Cáritas (3) and Cepaim (1) and a farmhouse—sold to Techô by the Junta de Andalucía—which will be run by the SJM and where 12 people will soon reside. They have also built a dozen homes—almost ready—which the Jesuits will also take care of and which will be able to accommodate another 60 people. “The important thing is not so much the quantitative as the qualitative. The idea is that they are there for about a year and then become independent. We are making a big bet, but this shows that different things can be done,” says Daniel Izuzquiza, director of the SJM in Almería, who believes that all parties—administrations, businessmen, social entities and citizens—must do their part. “Either we all contribute or this will not be solved for many more years,” he concludes.
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