meetings of young people who get together to drink and forget about the coronavirus

Gathering of girls and boys in public spaces to socialize and drink, here known as “bottles”, are a socio-cultural phenomenon that erupted in Spain in the 90s and that the pandemic has promoted as an outlet for the confinement and frustration that the virus has spread among the youngest.

Every weekend, macro-bottles in the emblematic squares and points of cities such as Madrid and Barcelona they leave hundreds of fines, some arrested and sometimes even damage, as happened last Saturday.

The bottle is the cheapest solution and, for the mentality of young people, the most anti-Covid because its natural setting is outdoors. However, they skip social distancing and the use of the chin strap which, while not mandatory in open spaces except in crowds, many consider a vintage practice.

This past weekend in Barcelona, the macro-bottle that brought together 40,000 people in Plaza España of the city made 20 detainees on Saturday night – there were 30 others on Sunday night – and 79 wounded. The destruction of the Palacio de los Congresos and the uncontrolled violence were the mouth of an evening which lost its initial festive meaning.

Because on Friday September 24 and throughout the weekend, Barcelona celebrated the feast of Mercè, during which the Catalans pay homage to the patron saint of the city to whom they attribute some miracles.

The pandemic

This year, 200,000 people attended the scheduled shows, By prior reservation and limited number of public, according to the restrictions due to the pandemic. In 2019, this celebration, Barcelona’s biggest festival, attracted 1.4 million visitors.

In Madrid, the national police expelled Sunday at dawn of the hundreds of young people piled up in the park of Berlin in the district of Chamartín. Annoyed for the brutal and involuntary end of the party, some threw bottles at the police. There were four inmates and a young man was stabbed.

In addition, the Municipal Police imposed fines between Saturday and Sunday. 513 people who participated in the big bottles in the capital.

The figure is however less alarming than that of the previous weekend, when a macro-bottle of 25,000 people gathered in the university city of Madrid to celebrate the start of the academic year in the faculties. resulted in 716 fines, almost all due to alcohol consumption on public roads.

The Spanish premiere in the fall with 76.8 percent of the population already vaccinated against the coronavirus with the full directive.

The current incidence is 65.4 contagions by Sars-Cov-2 per 100,000 residents in the past 14 days and over the past weekend, 5,039 new positive cases were diagnosed.

However, many young people continue to think of the pandemic as an “evil that afflicts the elderly” and that he will not touch them.

Summer

This was the reasoning of the students who, in June of this year, organized a trip to Mallorca.

There, a reggaeton concert in the bullring of Palma and the parties organized on boats and in various hotels in Llucmajor and Platja de Palma became a nightmarish mega-epidemic of 700 infected and more than two thousand boys who had to be isolated for having been in contact with people who tested positive for Covid-19.

It was the start of a Spanish summer that began to titillate and reimpose nighttime restrictions in several autonomous communities to stop the increase in cases and not spoil the second summer season of the Covid era.

“In an individualistic society like ours, phenomena like the bottle, which have a collective character, serve as an instrument to build this “we” shared that within the youth, it acquires a particular importance ”, estimated the sociologist Manuel Herrera when he analyzed the phenomenon for the Spanish press.

“It’s a cultural element, because it is a space to share, a generally nocturnal space in which these urban tribes bring out all the vital world they carry inside, ”added Herrera, who also teaches the master’s degree in social intervention in knowledge societies at the International University of La Rioja.

These nocturnal conclaves in public spaces were also creative: in gatherings of this type, musical styles such as hip-hop were born. But today, in Spain, young people hang on to the bottle as an antidote against the burden which, although mitigated by the encouraging effects of vaccination, continues to cause the pandemic.