They work in Ibiza hotels, but live in caravans: now they are being evicted before the season.

PalmIbiza will begin a new tourist season with the eviction of workers who They live in caravansTents and shacks due to the impossibility of accessing housing. Since last July, they have been living precariously in an illegal settlement located between the Palladium Can Misses stadium and the second ring road, the E-20.

Two of the affected workers, Elena Núñez and Ceferina Florenciano, explained to EFE that they have already been informed that they must vacate the private land they have occupied with their caravans before April 29th. They estimate that around eighty people live on the land. The eviction is scheduled for April 29th at 10:30 a.m. The Court of First Instance number 5 of Ibiza issued the eviction order on February 23rd in favor of Inmo Sirenis, the company that owns the land, which is also claiming damages.

Now, the workers, who have received no documents or communication, fear a forced eviction, just as the season is beginning and they are due to report to work at the hotels where they are employed as seasonal staff. Ceferina Florenciano is a chambermaid at Pacha Hotel Ibiza, and Elena Núñez works as a security guard at The Ibiza Twiins hotel, which belongs to the Ibiza-based hotel group Sirenis Hotels & Resorts. Inmo Sirenis, the real estate asset management company for this hotel chain, will be responsible for carrying out the eviction of the employee from one of its hotels. Florenciano explains that the settlement is home to year-round residents who work in the tourism sector, either in hotels or as cleaning, gardening, and maintenance staff for luxury homes and estates, or for the island's large construction companies.

Arriving in Ibiza in 2011 and originally from Paraguay, Florenciano worked as a live-in caregiver in homes with elderly people and later continued as a chambermaid in several hotels on the island.

Núñez, originally from Bolivia, has been in Spain since 2007. She first lived in Granada, where she cared for a woman with Alzheimer's, and after a brief stint in Madrid, she arrived in Ibiza to work with her husband as caretakers at an Italian count's mansion. During the pandemic, the aristocrat rented out the house, leaving them jobless. Since then, she has also worked in the hospitality industry. Both women, along with their partners, turned to caravans for housing after suffering mistreatment and exorbitant prices in the cramped apartments where they rented rooms. There, tenants who sublet rooms can charge between 1,000 and 1,400 euros per double room, in addition to the deposit.

"We couldn't live in the rooms anymore, because they don't let you do anything. You come home tired from work, you want to cook, you can't; you want to shower, you can't; and every day they raise the rent and raise it. We can't find peace in the rental market," explains Florenciano.

Núñez has shared an apartment with "a lot of people," where the woman in charge of subletting the rooms would cut off her electricity if she cooked or ran the washing machine and even raised her rent by 100 euros from one month to the next. In another apartment, the man in charge of renting the rooms would enter her room without permission, take her things, and even called her over, grabbed her shoulders, and shook her.

"Do people want you to be in your room like a punishment, unable to enjoy anything, locked up? Is it pay to be like a cornered animal, without fresh air, unable to even sit on a balcony?" Núñez asks.

"You can't live" in rented rooms

While the rented rooms are "unlivable," those in the caravans say they are "very peaceful." They keep the land clean and help each other out. Both women explain that staff from the Ibiza Town Hall visited the settlement last week to tell them they must leave. Faced with the eviction notice, they are asking the Town Hall to "take pity" and give them land where they can park their caravans in exchange for monthly payments, or for the landowner to allow them to stay this season, also in exchange for monthly payments. "We have no alternative, we don't even know where to go. We've looked everywhere and we have no options. That's what I told the people from the Town Hall. Where do we go? Will we park on another private property where they'll also kick us out? We can't go on living like this," says Florenciano. "We're thinking of putting the caravans out on the street, because we have no other choice," adds Núñez. This new eviction will add to those already carried out on the island, including the settlements of Can Rova I, Can Rova II, and the Gorg parking lot, among others. In fact, many of the occupants of this land have come from other settlements, such as Florenciano, who had his caravan parked for two years behind the Eivissa fairgrounds parking lot, which was also evicted. According to the first census carried out by the Ibiza Red Cross, 1,200 people were experiencing homelessness in 655 substandard dwellings last July, at the height of the tourist season.