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Comment by rosndo | Hacker News Reader

Barcelona has gone to shit in the past couple of years, it’s gone from a relatively safe city to one where it’s commonplace for knife-wielding gangs to rob your car in the stoplights.

Pre-covid, it was a wonderful place to live (although outside of restaurants customer service is non-existent)

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Hmm I don't agree, really, and I live in BCN, for 5 years now. People living here twice as long tell me how bad it was in the early 2000s, and it's nowhere like that today.

There's pickpocketing, sure, but it's not at all the hellhole you describe, seriously. Not sure where you got that from.

I lived in BCN for 4 years before the pandemic, I know how it was before.

>There's pickpocketing, sure, but it's not at all the hellhole you describe, seriously. Not sure where you got that from.

I’ve been here for just over a week, in that time I’ve been robbed twice. Once by a knife-wielding gang that slashed my tires as I was driving

My friends in the Mossos tell me that this is has all become super common after COVID, before such attacks would’ve been unheard of. Pretty much all of my local friends agree that everything has gone to shit after COVID bankrupted half the city.

It might be simple demographic differences leading us to experience this differently. Of course I’m more likely to be targeted driving a newish S-class than the guy in a Dacia, but this wasn’t something you had to worry about before.

Yeah op listen to this, some areas of Barcelona are now very dangerous, I lived there for 3 months during the worst part of covid.

Covid induced unemployment has spiked crime a lot. It was not unusual to see drug addicted shirtless guys carrying machetes walking through the streets first during the night and now during the day.

Infrastructure is starting to suffer because the drug addicts are pulling the copper out of the boxes.

Some central areas are better but I have friends there still and over the past 6 months every one of them has been robbed

Not just “some areas”, our car got robbed while driving on C/ de Mallorca just 2 blocks from Sagrada Familia, a normally quiet area near the centre.

Guys with knives surrounded the car and stabbed out the tires, pulled out whatever stuff they could get from the backseat.

A couple of days later two guys in hoodies ripped my watch from my wrist after I stepped out to smoke next to a posh Eixample restaurant. Admittedly I’d occasionally heard those stories before, but never had such an issue while wearing the same watch every day for 4 years back when I lived in Barcelona pre-covid.

It might still be quiet and safe in Sarria or Diagonal Mar, but the central areas seem to be worse than even the worst tourist areas were a couple of years ago.

@rosndo @malux85 not sure if you're just trying to scare away another expat or if it's legit :P but if legit that doesn't sound good at all :( any other places in Spain you would recommend? Valencia and some other cities are pretty non-car centric too, no?

Valencia isn’t so bad, but almost nobody speaks English. This is very helpful if you want to learn Spanish :)

The food scene in Valencia isn’t half as good as in Barcelona though, but the beach is infinitely better and life tends to be more relaxed.

Pre-COVID I would have recommended Barcelona to anybody.

Well, to do my part in scaring potential expats away, air pollution and noise pollution (it's LOUD) are pretty bad here and you might find lead pipes and asbestos in your building. If you live in a bajo (ground floor) in the old town, expect cockroaches the size of mice (they are quick). Depending on where you are, the tap water tastes like the water from a children's swimming pool. Depending on where you live, your barrio might smell like a sewer on certain days (even the expensive ones). Population density is very high, so expect to hear a part of your neighbors' lives, walls are often thin.

Never seen shirtless guys with machetes anywhere, day or night. Crime (apart from pickpocketing) never struck me as a huge problem (not above general big-city levels), neither pre- nor post-Covid, and I don't live in the best part of town for sure. But all the stuff above I personally experienced.

I dont know, I only lived in Barcelona sorry, but I lived there pre-covid for about 6 months, then moved to Germany for 8 months, then back to Barcelona for about 3-4 months ... after I went back the city was a LOT scarier.

Valencia and Málaga also meet your requirements, I think.

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