Shorouk Express
If you’ve been at Madrid Barajas’ Terminal 4 in recent years, you may have been approached by someone asking you for money, perhaps pretending to be a traveller who has run out of money or lost their wallet.
The Spanish capital’s airport has seen a steep rise in the number of homeless people and beggars marauding the terminals and sleeping there overnight, especially in T4, the main terminal for international flights.
According to stats from Spain’s Aena airport operator and Madrid’s City Hall, there are now between 370 and 500 homeless people at Barajas, whilst a decade ago they numbered just 40.
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But there are also pickpockets, unofficial luggage wrappers, criminal gangs and even prostitutes operating across the airport’s four terminals.
Airport workers say they’ve turned Barajas into a ‘lawless city’, with beggars sleeping in lifts or setting up tents, litter building up everywhere, foul smells, deteriorating infrastructure and toilets being left in a pitiful state.
Trade union Alternativa Sindical claims that homeless people do their business at check-in counters while others have been caught in the toilets taking drugs. There was even a report that a homeless person regularly walks around Barajas stark naked.
“There are people who are homeless and sleep at the airport, but there are also homeless people who rob passengers,” one of the workers told Spanish news site Preferente.
Other reports point out that some of Barajas’ homeless are just people who have fallen on hard times, or who actually work but cannot afford to pay for a place to rent in Madrid.
They can easily be confused for travellers who may have missed their flights, as they often have suitcases with them, but the fact that they sleep inside sleeping bags and on sleeping mats is a clear giveaway that they are more ‘permanent’ residents than passengers waiting for a flight the next day.
The airport offers them a place to keep warm indoors during the bitter cold winter months and stay cool during the sweltering summers, a public and covered shelter that can be hard to come by in Spain’s capital.
READ ALSO: ‘I came to Madrid airport to sleep and stayed’
With all the security cameras and police presence, Barajas also represents a safer place than sleeping rough in the city.
Aena and Madrid City Hall are now considering solutions, from potentially evicting all the homeless people or cutting off access and emptying the terminals of people from midnight to 3am.
However, most of the vagrants are asylum seekers, which means the situation also needs to be handled by Spain’s Ministry of Migration and Inclusion.
“While Aena keeps passing the buck to the city council, the regional government of Madrid and the national government for years and years, the legal solution hasn’t arrived,” airport union ASAE told Preferente, whilst also criticising the inaction of Spain’s national police.
The situation at Barcelona’s airport is similar to that of Barajas, but not as serious.
It’s estimated that around a hundred people sleep in the terminals every night at El Prat. Some homeless people suffer from mental problems, others from addictions, and authorities cannot agree on what they have to do to solve the problem, with no particular body wanting to take responsibility.
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At Palma de Mallorca’s airport, dozens of homeless people slept until recently in one of the car parks, but now they have moved to the departure terminal.
At night, they gather together in the same space to feel safer, with allegations that some passengers harass them while they sleep.
Overall, Aena claims that it cannot do anything to prevent the presence of beggars and homeless people at the airports it manages, since this falls under the umbrella of responsibilities of local authorities.
As long as their presence does not disrupt the operation of its airports, they cannot or perhaps don’t want to act.
Spain received 94 million international tourists in 2024 and its airports were used by 396 million passengers.
Therefore, the safety, cleanliness and reputation of the country’s airports should matter not just for local officials, but on a state level, especially in a country for which tourism is of such crucial economic importance.
Spanish airports’ homelessness problem also highlights the sad reality of the country’s sin techo or personas sin hogar, as homeless people are called in Spanish. In 2022, they numbered around 28,000 across the country, according to official estimates.
