Silhouettes shuttle between the roadside and three narrow doorways as the pink sky lightens. It’s just before 8am on the 25th February, and nestled amongst the winding back roads between plastic covered greenhouses sits a low row of whitewashed concrete houses. A group of men are carrying boxes, buckets, rugs, a children’s bike, and a fridge out to the fence on the far side of the road.
As I make eye contact, I’m greeted with deep smiles and an “Hola! Que tal?” (Hello, how are you?). They continue to ferry their belongings out to the roadside – items scattered haphazardly in the dirt.
These men are amongst 50 people ordered to leave their homes in the asentamiento of Cortijo El Uno (informal settlements, called ‘chabolas’ in Spanish), including women and 9 children. This group is from Morocco – one man tells me he’s lived in his house for just over a year, and another has been here for four years. They work in the greenhouses around Almería in southern Spain, helping to produce millions of tonnes of produce each year, like tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines and peppers.
The men I speak to, like tens of thousands of others in the region, are undocumented – working without legal papers, unprotected and exploited. They live here because they cannot find affordable accommodation in the region.
These people experience hardship and labour exploitation performing vital jobs that sustain Almería’s greenhouse export industry, part of a continued economic growth in multinational supermarkets profiteering from the world’s poorest.
Precarious Work, Precarious Homes
This is private land, however, and space that could be turned into yet another productive greenhouse. The land owner began eviction proceedings back in 2011, with an eviction notice finally being granted by the local authorities in summer 2024. But the date for the eviction was only set days before, giving the inhabitants little practical forewarning. Having been left in limbo for over six months, there has been a desperate and apparently largely fruitless scramble for alternative accommodation.
A number of local charities and organisations that support migrants in the region have condemned this process – five religious organisations published a statement expressing their outrage at the lack of alternative accommodation options for the inhabitants and young families who lived in Cortijo El Uno. One of these, the Jesuit Service for Migrants (SJM), was representing the group and actively supporting inhabitants on the eviction day as a formal observer.
A History of Erasure
This is not the first eviction of an informal settlement – in July 2024, the Cañaveral chabola, home to 20 migrants from West Africa, was demolished. In that case, however, SJM had worked for a year with the residents to arrange alternative housing in the town of San Isidro before the local town council bulldozers moved in.
As the bulldozer moves in, a local activist tells me that the story of El Walili is in the forefront of everyone’s minds. This was the settlement of 500 people that was destroyed in January 2023, with inhabitants given no alternatives.
The authorities had initially intended to rehouse them in the barracks at Los Grillos, but these have only recently been finished after two years of stalled construction, and a management firm to enact the planned 24-hour surveillance and curfew has yet to be found. Particularly disturbing were the fires that broke out as people were being evicted, sealing the fate of the settlement.
These evictions are not the result of isolated land disputes – these are part of a plan by the authorities to rid the region of informal settlements. El Walili was undoubtedly targeted because of its location on a main tourist road to the Cabo de Gata Natural Park, but it signalled the start of an official policy to remove all settlements in the region.
It has been estimated that there are more than 90 informal migrant settlements across Almeria’s Níjar province of varying sizes. The authorities plan to destroy these but have no practical alternatives in place for the thousands of inhabitants working in the intensive greenhouse industry responsible for the region’s economic success.
Meanwhile, a police officer at the eviction of Cortijo El Uno asked an activist why they were trying to block the eviction, “we’re destroying this place for their own good, they can’t live in these conditions”, he says. The activist replies, “But where will they go now? They have nowhere and the alternative is so much worse!”.
With only a few days’ notice, some inhabitants have temporarily stayed with friends. Around a dozen people were still in their homes when the police arrived shortly after 9am, and half a dozen men are still removing their belongings as the bulldozers begin razing the first dwellings. Despite the mild climate, it is winter here, and inland, temperatures drop well into single digits and the ground is wet. Many people will end up sleeping rough.
This eviction comes at a time when work in the greenhouses is hardest to find – some inhabitants tell me that there is often little available work at this time of the year because crops are growing slowly and some farmers are pausing between campaigns.
The Cost of Europe’s Year-Round Harvest
The situation for migrants in the province of Almería looks bleak. More than 100,000 greenhouse workers are needed in the region, with most of these filled by migrants. A little over a quarter of these are filled by undocumented migrants, many of whom share jobs, meaning that more than 25,000 people are being employed illegally.
A Senegalese man who worked in greenhouses long enough to obtain residency in Spain tells me that there are far more people in the region than there are jobs, and many are without work. A group of Gambian men tell me how hard it is to find affordable accommodation in the region, themselves relying on temporary housing supported by a local charity.
All of the migrants here have taken long and dangerous journeys in the hope of a better life and a means of supporting their families back home – whether on foot from Turkey or by small boat from West Africa. This latter route can take up to 10 days for the c. 2,500km journey and recent reports suggest a death rate of more than 1-in-5.
These are gruelling, psychologically damaging journeys, but people take this risk because they have no hope at home – earlier this year, a woman from West Africa gave birth on a boat aiming for Tenerife.
The eviction of Cortijo El Uno is another step towards planned eradication of the unsightly ‘chabolas’ in the province of Almería. Without viable alternatives, their vulnerable inhabitants will be pushed further into the margins.
Meanwhile, the greenhouse agriculture in the region continues to rely on them for more than 25% of its labour force. This paradox leaves people trapped in the in-between space risking their own lives to sustain a sector responsible for the dramatic economic success of the region and of Spain – almost 3 million Euro is made in the region from horticultural exports. These are the impacts of the cheap, year-round, perfect vegetable systems – we should know their real price.
