The young men opened the building around 10:30 a.m. on September 2. It has been empty for ten years and since it is an old school most of the people in the neighborhood have passed through it and for that reason they have decided to “return to it”.

It has been denounced that the city is being rebuilt for non-Donostians and that it can soon become “impossible” to live in the old town. The purpose of this type of space is to be cross-referenced, so that any attack can be avoided to have access to education and liberating leisure and to identify and satisfy the needs of the neighbors through collaborative work.

People in the neighborhood felt the need for a space (leisure groups, parents’ associations, youth assemblies or neighborhood associations). In 2014, the City Council was asked to transform the Kaialde building into a neighbourhood. The response of the City Council was that it was an indispensable building for higher education. Four years later, the children occupied the building.

Here is the document released by the young people:

It’s been empty for 10 years now, since it ceased to be a neighborhood children’s school, where most of the neighborhood’s young people have passed and we have now decided to return to it. For a long time we have had different elaborations and requests about the lack of space in the neighborhood (youth assemblies, leisure groups, parents’ associations or neighborhood associations) from the hand of the neighborhood association that Kaialde itself was asked to be used as a neighborhood house in 2014, impossible in the words of the city council, where they had to prepare a professional training center that was absolutely necessary.

Other rumors have spread since then, the last of which was that they would build homes for the elderly, when 20% of the homes in the Old Town are empty, anything before attending to the needs and demands of the neighborhood! As I said at the beginning, the building has not had any use in the last 10 years.

We were educated here and we want to continue educating here, in collectivity and self-management. But also in opposition to capitalist projects, let us be clear that spaces and projects of this kind do not last long if solidarity is not organized. Let the resistance of Maravillas and the support received be the starting point!

The heteropatriarchal capitalist system and the institutions and political parties that guarantee its survival have an intrinsic opposition to the interests of San Sebastián, the neighbourhood and its neighbours. Who could deny that both the neighbourhood and San Sebastián are in the hands of the economic elite and that a few are being enriched by trade? Does this only cause problems for the majority of the residents? How else can we explain the eviction of the Youth Cork? Metro, incinerator and AAV? How to explain the invasion of hotels and tourists in our streets? The Disappearance of Small Business? An increase in the cost of rentals that have become invaluable (m2=4,280€)? or that the children can not play in the Plaza Nueva?...

The city is being rebuilt, but not for Donostia-San Sebastián, we have no place here; if it is absurd for the neighbours to live there, it can soon become impossible.

In the struggle against all this we hope that the occupation of the Youth Center of the Old Town (at number 2 of Calle Campandegi) will be a significant and permanent step forward. Thus, all social movements will have at their disposal, on the one hand, an infrastructure for their needs and, on the other, a meeting point for the construction of a liberating project, in the Old Town, in the heart of the most capitalist San Sebastián.

For the purpose of self-management of the neighborhood and its neighbors, because without this type of space it becomes impossible: to be rewarded so that any attack can be avoided, to have access to a liberating education and leisure (beyond bars and tapas) or to begin to search together for alternatives to identify and satisfy the needs of the neighborhood.

Because all of this makes a Youth Center “a way of understanding the world” rather than spaces. Keep all the fighters in the world! Come to the Open Assembly 16:30, Portal 2 of Campandegi Street so that together we can shape the project!

Only because we will make it possible by organization! There's a lot of self-management on the side of the pier!