A heterogeneous group of about 30 neighbors mills restlessly around a building at the end of Santo Domingo street, in the central neighborhood of Santa María de Cádiz. It’s past ten o’clock at night on a weekday and the group of ladies, middle-aged Cadiz residents and kids look expectantly at the second-floor balcony. Sonia Novoa, a neighbor who anxiously claims to live in fear of the tenants of a nearby drug point, looks out: “I’m fine.” Those gathered breathe a sigh of relief, say goodbye and continue their patrol. Down the street, more than five tarps hang from balcony to balcony. “Drugs destroy, the neighborhood builds”, “children playing without people buying”, “less retail, more retail”, they pray. “We are the neighborhood, there are no names here. We are humble people who want security, not anyone selling drugs. This is worse than the 90s because now they are more aggressive,” denounces a 60-year-old neighbor who acts as an anonymous improvised spokesperson. The round continues, the night will be long, until the edge of dawn.
The neighborhood of Santa María—Cádiz’s historic cradle of flamenco, a scenario that has almost surpassed substandard housing and poverty—has decided to organize to stop the return of drugs to its streets, the same drug that turned those picturesque corners into a hostile scene in the 80s and 90s of the last century. “We are in a bad way, we have been silent for a long time, but we must already have about 14 or 15 drug points,” estimates the spokesperson for tonight’s patrol. Everything has happened so quickly that it has caught the rest of the city and the Administrations with a changed pace. Last Saturday, April 11, Isa, another neighbor from the neighborhood, posted on her Facebook wall her plea to mobilize. A day later, the first neighborhood patrol started, which since then has been touring the neighborhood’s hot spots “peacefully,” as the spokesperson points out. This Friday, a massive demonstration with hundreds of people demonstrated through the streets of Santa María to shout “no to drugs”, in a clamor joined by their neighborhood association, Carnival groups and all the neighborhood brotherhoods.
For Yolanda Gómez, 50, all of this reminds her so much of the drug mothers’ movement, of which her now-disappeared mother was a part, that she gets emotional: “My mother was one of them, I couldn’t imagine this happening again.” At his side, Cristina Vidal, 27, nods her head, from the door of her house on Botica Street: “But here we are, for my two-year-old daughter, so that she can go out and play in the street safely.” Neighbors report that, since the end of 2025, insecurity has grown. They talk about polydrug addicts who prowl the neighborhood – most of them are not even neighbors – in search of a fix, fights among themselves in the wee hours of the morning or petty thefts in which these criminals harass minors or elderly women so that they give them “the euro they have on them”, as the spokesperson adds.
Novoa is no longer able to hide the anxiety with which he lives. On April 1, he reported his neighbor to the police for the destruction, robberies and threats he suffered from him, whom he also accused of living in an apartment that sold drugs. He shows the damage in his mailbox and the portal, in a Procasa building, the municipal housing company. His case is paradigmatic of the retail problems reported by the neighborhood: homes located on the ground floor that become points of sale and consumers who adopt violent attitudes, largely caused by the most destructive and cheapest drug that polydrug addicts have been using for a few years: rebujito. “It is a combination of cocaine with heroin that is very addictive and makes them very violent. A dose can cost about 10 euros,” says an agent who has worked with this type of intervention.
The police do not deny the problem, but they admit they are partially incapable of doing much more. “It’s very unpleasant,” says the agent. “They are on drugs all day and when they have a monkey, they get involved. They are small things (in reference to crimes), but it is a neighborhood ordeal,” adds the same police officer, who assures that, after the public complaint, the police force in the area has been increased. But he also assures that stopping it is complicated: “If they are not committing a crime at that moment, we cannot kick them off the street, they are people who have their rights like anyone else.” But the neighbors reply, in a feeling that Gómez summarizes: “What we want is for them to remove the drug floors, we know where they are. Meanwhile, we will go out into the streets together to say we are here and we are accompanied.”
The public denunciation of the problem, championed by its Las Tres Torres neighborhood association, has also led the Government Subdelegation in Cádiz and the City Council to make a move. Both the subdelegate, Blanca Flores, and the mayor, Bruno García, have already gone to the neighborhood to listen to the neighborhood demands, as confirmed by both institutions. In addition, this past Wednesday, the City Council vacated and sealed a private building on Botica Street that had been closed since 2024 due to the risk of collapse, but which had been converted into a farm. busy where drugs were sold and consumed and where, in addition, two vulnerable families lived who have already been relocated. Since then, Local Police vehicles have been added to the reinforcement of the National Police, monitoring the streets.
There are those who point to that newly sealed property as the beginning of the degradation of the drug problem. But Gómez talks about more points on Mirador or Santo Domingo streets, in a situation that has become increasingly rarer in recent months. “We have already seen how, at Christmas, a food delivery man refused to enter the neighborhood for fear of being robbed,” complains a young man who is part of one of the night patrols. Vidal lived in fear as one afternoon, in broad daylight, one of the habitual drug users chased her through the streets while she was with her daughter. Antonio, husband of the neighbor Isabel who made the publication on social networks, has chosen to go pick up his daughter at the doors of the neighborhood, when she returns from going out in the early morning. “Between the drugs, the rats, the mob that comes and the illegal tourist apartments, they are destroying the neighborhood,” he exclaims, annoyed.
The breeze that precedes the easterly wind mitigates the spring night cold and makes the dozens of banners that have proliferated in every corner of the neighborhood wave, all with the signature 11006, the postal code of Santa María. Madrid plays against Bayern and that desert moment before would have been ideal for the marauders from the drug dens to be seen in the area. But so much flagging, neighborhood patrols and the movement of journalists and cameras has them missing. Yoli Pérez, 69, goes up Santo Domingo Street after a walk; the day before she already participated in one of those neighborhood groups. “I was also a mother of drugs, when I was pregnant we would sit at the door of the places where it was sold and when someone came to buy we told them not to do it. Nothing ever happened to me, but now I have seen that they are more aggressive,” the woman reflects on that experience lived 36 years ago.
Pérez’s five children grew up healthy and happy in a neighborhood that metamorphosed with them. Various public housing plans put an end to the very poor little games —rooms in parts of the house with common bathrooms and kitchens— and the disappearance of drugs in the streets meant that Santa María stopped being that dangerous area for the citizens of Cádiz, who even went so far as to border it—to avoid entering—on their comings and goings to the new area, Puertatierra. So the neighborhood is not willing, even remotely, to return to that hostile scenario. “How long are we going to last? Until we can live in peace again, we are not going to stop,” Cristina Vidal ditches with genius.
