23 Oct, 2014
How Barcelona’s homeless are guiding tourists round the city’s underbelly | theguardian.com
Juan knows Barcelona’s downtown very well; he has spent four years sleeping rough on its streets. An incident with drugs had brought about his deportation from Germany, where he was subsequently banned from living or working for a decade.
The Andalusian found himself all alone, back in a country that was no less strange despite being his original home. “My parents and sister were still in Germany, where our family moved when I was six,” he says. “So the plan was to stay here for a while and then move to the Netherlands, where I would at least be a three-hour car ride away from them. But then I ran out of money.”
Juan is now a guide for Hidden City Tours, half social project, half tourism agency, offering an alternative view of Barcelona. The only difference is that up to three times a day, come rain or shine, homeless people are your trusty guides. As the company motto asserts, who better to show you around the streets of Barcelona than someone who has lived on those very streets?
Read the rest: How Barcelona’s homeless are guiding tourists round the city’s underbelly | Cities | theguardian.com.
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