Statement from La Ruïna and el Kubo squats in Barcelona:

We will turn our house into a battlefield, el Kubo, and the Ruïna will not fall. See you on November 30 at 5:30 a.m. in Uri Caballero Square, Vallcarca metro station in Barcelona. If el Kubo and La Ruïna fall, the neighbourhood will burn down. OKUPA Y RESISTE!

Statement made in February 2023, La Ruïna and el Kubo threatened with eviction:

Our squats are trenches.

Here we go; on March 23, they will try to evict us. In 2016, an office building was squatted for the first time in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood, and we called it El Kubo. The Kubo has been the home and place of passage for more than a hundred people in the past 6 years it has existed. This has been the home and trench of many people. It has been an oasis of resistance in the bourgeois quarter of Barcelona for many years, and this has not been easy. “Squat and resist” defines Kubo’s history very well. During all these years, we have faced two evictions and the constant siege of extreme right-wing groups, capitalist press and political parties. And despite the hostilities, we have reoccupied and resisted this house all this time.

The Kubo has been the satellite and fundamental point for the birth and resistance of what is now the CSO La Ruïna in 2019. SAREB abandoned this space for more than 15 years. La Ruïna has also been home to many people for four years and is a space that has tried in the most coherent way possible to stand up to gentrification and speculation in our city, in the neighbourhood with the highest per capita income in Barcelona.

The story of La Ruïna cannot be understood without El Kubo and vice versa. This is why it is so difficult for us to separate the two houses since, for many years, we have worked as families who feed off each other in the struggle for the defence of squatting and direct action, specifically, in a neighbourhood that, as we have said before, has not ceased attacks since we arrived.

We believed, and still believe, that we need to have a presence and occupy spaces where we are not wanted. Where the businessmen the politicians, live. Where the embassies are, where the wealth is, where there is confrontation and where we have a remarkable impact, the two properties belong to the SAREB, which currently has around 57,000 empty properties spread throughout the state, to which we point directly and tell them that we are not going to leave, that we are going to defend our homes and our social centres as if it were a trench since we are certain that they are worth fighting for.

Apart from being a living space, our squat has hosted local struggles, international struggles, and DIY training workshops. It has been a space where we can question the structural problems of our society and organize against them. We have organized concerts and soup kitchens; we have created culture, theatre, poetry, talks, debates and, above all, created bonds of solidarity and resistance.

We believe in squatting not only as a tool of direct action against the state and the precariousness to which it subjects us but also as a way to put into practice horizontality, solidarity, mutual support and a way to grow together with our comrades and neighbours on the margins of the subjugation of the state.

The structural problems are obvious: people without homes and houses without people, and in the face of this unscrupulous injustice, we will continue squatting. In the face of any attempt to put an end to our movement with smear campaigns in the mass media or with laws such as the LeCrim, we will continue to squat and organize ourselves better. Because we have less and less to lose and more desire to live a livable life in a community, following the principles of non-aggression, claiming self-management, self-defence and the struggle against this grey future that awaits us in the cities.

We believe in what we do and will continue to squat despite the laws directed against us, just as we did with the previous ones, and just as it was done whenever there was private property to squat.

Because our homes and social centres are much more than four walls, they are spaces where we can try to create new alternative ways of life outside the state where we can develop as people, and that is why we must defend them at all costs.

We know from the record that they won’t stop; they will come for us. But from the runes of some buildings in the bourgeois heart of Barcelona, we have built spaces where we could think that we could fight against this network of destruction and apathy that is capital and the projects of European cities. Dead, grey, unlivable and dehumanized to the point of nausea.

You don’t know the pain, frustration and hatred this eviction generates in us. Our chests beat with fury inside each of us as we see how quickly we will destroy years of sweat, beautiful moments, hard work and resistance when we see the future ahead. The rage that invades us will grow with each blow of the water hammer that our doors receive, and our organization will be stronger for each blow of the truncheon we receive.

The day the BRIMO arrives at La Ruïna or the Kubo, you will find us in front of you.

We call on all squats, collectives, and individuals in Barcelona and its surroundings to help us defend the Kubo and the Ruïna, just as we urge the defence of all the liberated spaces in the state with everything we have at our disposal so that it continues to be possible to build together, organize, and continue dreaming of a life that is not the one they want to impose on us.

~ The anarchist resistance in the bourgeois quarter of Barcelona

CSO La Ruïna
Carrer de Sant Joan de La Salle 4, Barcelona
https://squ.at/r/7yo0

El Kubo
Carrer de Sant Joan de La Salle 6, Barcelona
https://squ.at/r/9szo