Can Masdeu (Barcelona, Spain)

A squatted collective home and social centre with terraced vegetable gardens on the Collserola hillside beside Barcelona's Nou Barris district. The building is a 17th-century masia standing on a Roman site, later a nunnery and then a leper hospital, shuttered and abandoned in 1948. After roughly 53 years empty it was occupied by international activists in December 2001. In April 2002 police tried to remove eleven squatters; the residents locked themselves to precarious perches, seesaws and suspended frames outside the building for three days, and as public support grew a judge ordered the police to withdraw, ruling that human rights took precedence over property rights.

The occupants invited residents of the adjoining Nou Barris neighbourhood to garden with them, and it was local elderly neighbours who first took up the offer. Resident gardeners and occupants have held monthly or bi-monthly potlucks ever since. On most Sundays from late September to early June the site operates as a social centre, the Punt d'Interacció de Collserola (PIC), running workshops on ecology, permaculture and activism that close with a communal meal.

A non-profit collective operating on squatted land and buildings — paying no rent and receiving no public subsidy. The building is owned by Sant Pau hospital; civil and criminal cases have followed, but the occupation has persisted in part because the hospital lacks the funds to renovate.

It turned land and buildings left empty since 1948 into gardens worked by neighbours and a weekend space for learning. The 2002 court ruling over the attempted eviction is widely cited as a landmark on the relation between occupying idle urban land and property rights.

Occupation without the owner's consent — the site is held by Sant Pau hospital and there is no contractual title, so the use remains legally provisional.

Web articles and features that cover this case.

• ArticleCan Masdeu — Wikipedia ↗en.wikipedia.org