The Andalusian “Las Vegas”: ethnic cleansing, destitution and public services in a Seville housing estate

Seville has a reputation in Andalucía. Its citizens, marked out for being more “pijo” (a Spanish idiom denoting poshness or swank) than the rest of the region, are stereotypically depicted in various memes as the wearers of sports scarves, pastel polo shirts and carefully curated mullets. Equally, the city itself centre boasts a wide range of ‘bougey’ boutiques and luxurious restaurants. However, as is the case in many European cities, the suburbs of Seville are radically poorer than the town centre; in addition, they are marked by their racial diversity, while the high street is almost entirely white. However, there is one particular suburb of Seville that stands out, notorious today as much as it was upon its foundation in the 60s.

This suburb is a housing estate known as Las Tres Mil Viviendas - The Three Thousand Homes. I first encountered Las Tres Mil in a class I was taking at the university in medieval history. The professor was talking about the destitution that some Moorish people suffered after their effective expulsion from Spanish society in the 16th century, when a student asked “Like how they live in Las Tres Mil?” I was shocked by the notion these people – the professor included – were perfectly comfortable with talking about these citizens of the estate, equal in their rights as inhabitants of Seville, as though they were distinctly second-class citizens, compared to destitute medieval serfs without a second thought. While background reading doesn’t make this comparison okay, it explains why the sevillanos treat the residents of Las Tres Mil the way they do.

In 1968, the construction of Las Tres Mil began. The estate was originally conceived as an ethnic barrio for Roma who had been forcibly relocated from the central area of Triana; now a rich tourist hotspot, culturally exploited for its former association with the Roma people. In this regard, the construction of Las Tres Mil was a concerted effort to force the gitanos, as the Spanish call them, who had been living in Triana for centuries, to move somewhere simultaneously isolated and entirely segregated. It might have been undertaken under the guise of clearing the shanty and disorder of Triana in that era, but the context of the move carried a very clear sense of racial segregation.

While Triana was an effable melting pot of peoples, Las Tres Mil was intended as a homogenous bloc of Roma, surrounded by other homogenous blocs in the greater district known as the Poligono Sur. This led to the dirty question of whether the estate – and its living conditions up to the modern day – constitute a case of ethnic cleansing on behalf of the Francoist government in its closing days.

Even today, the estate suffers an excessive number of dwellings in a state of complete disrepair, or flats filled to the brim with far too many families under one roof. Furthermore, some bus lines have been cut, and fire services have previously refused to make their way into the estate. However, more often than not, this exclusion is applied to one area, specifically: they call it Las Vegas.

As an exceedingly blonde (i.e foreign-looking) boy with a slight frame and a very poor understanding of Spanish gang culture, I have hardly seen Las Vegas. But the stories I’ve heard from foreigners who travelled there with trustworthy guides paint a grim picture. Gun and knife crime run rife and the streets are a mess with uncollected rubbish. Yet in spite of this grim image, Las Vegas is still known to maintain one part of the culture that defined the Roma, long before they were forcibly excluded: Flamenco. On occasion, the streets would suddenly fill with a sorrowful, melancholy chant, very similar to that heard in Seville’s Flamenco museum. But these Roma are the real, modern descendants of the creators of Flamenco; the appropriation by Spaniards at large of a tradition that is not only claimed by Seville but more specifically its gitanos only serves to add insult to injury.

Local projects in Las Tres Mil aim to harness the raw passion for Flamenco that has failed to dissipate in the face of economic misery: guitar classes, dance clubs and other charity initiatives have spent years trying to raise the hopes of gitanos here. But these attempts have been entirely non-governmental; the abandonment of Seville’s council (ayuntamiento) extends that far, and further; Las Tres Mil is a hotbed of undocumented immigrants and uneducated minors, while the adult literacy rate stands at only 26%. In this respect, the city’s position has always been to shy away from the suburb’s problems, instead of confronting them.

The segregation of the gitanos into one area of Seville, instead of the melting pot of Triana, has aided in their isolation from the city at large. The bargaining power of a single homogenous group with low education and a high number of young people (which come together to yield a low voter turnout) is fragile at best, especially when many adults in Las Tres Mil are likely to work on the black market. Its citizens are at a serious risk of entering into a vicious cycle; the poor quality of life in Las Tres Mil, and the crime that comes with it, perpetuate an abandonment by the city council, which in turn maintains the poor quality of life. And in tight-knit communities like this, leaving can be out of the question.

The struggle is compounded by the position of gitanos in Spanish society. Their culture and way of life make them easy targets for discrimination, and if that discrimination is widely held enough, it starts seeping into policy. Nobody can say if that seepage has diminished since the Three Thousand Homes were built. Comparisons to Grenfell might seem heavy-handed, but the fact remains; both were built in eras when brutalist, ultra-modern housing estates were all the rage, and both are now unfit for purpose. When the architecture itself becomes complicit, something has gone wrong.

In the dregs of dictatorship and the transition to democracy, Spanish politicians signed a document they called the “Pact of Forgetting”. As the name suggests, the Pact aimed to reduce any bubbling factionalism in the wake of the transition, by agreeing to consign the Francoist era to the absolute past. However, monuments to the man still stand country-wide; his grave a giant crucifix in the hills of Madrid. Las Tres Mil, a work of racial segregation in the guise of a housing estate, is one of these monuments; unforgettable so long as it stands, yet an invisible city - to all sevillanos but those that live within its walls.