Spain: noise exasperates the inhabitants

“The only thing that differentiates us from other countries is that we are more noisy,” recently wrote the Spanish author Ignacio Peyró. However, tolerance is crumbling in Spain, where many inhabitants say they are in front of a sound level deemed unbearable. Shards of votes and ignited exchanges, sometimes even accompanied by music, up to advanced hours: in the street as in bars, the level of decibels is often raised in Spanish cities, where foreign tourists come to confuse the din of discussions with disputes.

In summer, this trend is increasing, the high temperatures pushing the inhabitants to linger on the cafes terraces, while the holiday season is in full swing, from Saint-Jean to the San Fermin, with their processions of speakers, garish rides and fireworks. “We have as many words to talk about the party (…) that the Inuit have it to describe the snow,” insists Ignacio Peyró in his chronicle published in the daily El País.

A boon for night owls but a nightmare for residents, especially in downtown neighborhoods, such as Chueca and Malasaña in Madrid or El Born and Gràcia in Barcelona, ​​where it is difficult to sleep with open windows, while some old dwellings have no air conditioning. “If you have a light sleep, it is impossible to sleep,” said AFP Toni Fernández, a 58-year-old hairdresser who has lived for fifteen years in front of a bar terrace in the Chueca district, and dreams of moving as soon as he can-that is to say “soon”, he specifies.

“I think that the Portuguese have another culture, consisting in speaking much lower, because even I notice that I speak hard when I go to Portugal,” explains this fifties from Vigo, a city of Galicia (northwest) close to the Portuguese border. In a national climate where noise tolerance is high, those who complain are accused of “being pinnailing, asocial, hypersensitive”, underlines Yomara García, president of the lawyer lawyers against noise, during a congress on acoustics in Malaga (south).

“The right to personal intimacy, at the inviolability of the home, what is colloquially called the right to rest, is a hierarchically superior right” to the “so-called right to leisure, which is not a fundamental right”, insists this lawyer.

Traditionally centered on bars, noise -related disputes have recently extended to Padel fields, this very popular racket game in Spain, deemed excessively noisy, but also to neighborhood celebrations and in concerts organized in stadiums, such as the Bernabeu Santiago, where Real Madrid has suspended Sine Die under pressure from the neighborhood.

Critics have even reached Barcelona school lessons, which had to be exempt from noise regulations by the Catalan Parliament. The proliferation, for several years, of associations of residents militant for a generalized decrease in the sound level, such as the Catalan association against acoustic pollution (ACCCA) or the network of neighbors against noise (Xavecs), also illustrates a change of mentality.

Managed by Dominican nuns, the center of Madrid silence is precisely a refuge for the inhabitants exasperated by the ambient din. When it opened in 2011, this space, which welcomed around fifty people per week, was a rarity. Today, on the contrary, “there are a lot of offers of retirement spaces, silence, meditation,” said its director Elena Hernández Martín.

For Ana Cristina Ripoll, a 59 -year -old philosophy professor who frequented the center, the attitude towards noise has not changed much in Spain. “I don’t think there is any awareness. When I ask the person next to me in the metro to lower the volume of their phone because they put music (…) it happens that they get angry, “says this teacher. Before concluding, disappointed: “There are even people who throw you: +it’s Spain! +”