500 people already live at the airport between travelers and coexistence problems

From 11 at night, security personnel begin to verify documents and to evict those who do not have valid shipments (…) The airport design is simple but there are few private corners or remote spaces. If you need to go to bed on the floor, it brings an extra layer because the floor is mostly cold and hard tile

You can read the description in Sleeping in the Airportsa web space where all tips and small tricks or recommendations to take into account are offered if what you want is to sleep in an airport. The description above speaks of Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport.

It is just one of many. In it you can read details that make a difference if you need to spend the night at the airport. And the aid is so useful if you have passed security control or not. “The McDonald’s seats are padded” But also that “readers inform us that there are sources next to the bathrooms” or that “in the T4, next to the VIP room of Iberia, there is a small more private corner.”

This web space is a reference but it is not the only one you will find on the Internet. Reddit is full of threads in which advice is requested to spend the best way in these spaces. In Quora It is also easy to find them. Here, a user explains his bad experience at the Shanghai airport for not being informed that he was committing a foul.

In recent years, there are more those who sleep at airports. Well because their flight leaves too early or, on the contrary, they have arrived late enough to not be able to use public transport to the city and expect the dawn of the next day.

Or, simply, because they have nowhere to go and the airport offers them a safe and hot place.

Where to sleep if you have nowhere to sleep

The latter is what has been happening at the Madrid airport. ASAE union (union alternative AENA ENAIRE) calculates that, every day, about 500 people sleep distributed by the four airport terminals. A number that has multiplied in a decade. They estimate that then there were no more than 40 people who took refuge in this space.

The union denounces that workers are afraid to go to their jobs. They explain to The country that there are homeless people who sleep every night because they have no other place to go but those who drug themselves in the bathrooms or those who steal from tourists are also common.

“Aena is all facade, an apparent good image, but in reality is contributing to this lack of control. Before it was a problem, now it is a problem. We need to press the Government to modify current legislation, ”explains one of the workers to the newspaper.

The Madrid case is not unique in Spain. Last year the Generalitat, Aena and the municipalities of El Prat and Barcelona gathered to find a solution to the same problem. There, it is estimated that every night a hundred homeless sleeps. “It is a serious social problem, and it is inadmissible for no one to take over,” he said then a National Police agent to the medium.

Two years before, the problem had stayed in a forgotten corner. In The avant -garde They collected in 2022 that Several people lived in one of the abandoned parking lots after the last reform of the airport despite being within its facilities.

Although in Spain we have put the focus on homeless people, outside our borders, airports are also common where more people sleep or, at least, try. There are no conclusive data that meet the problem but it is easy to find the articles in which the theme is addressed from different angles.

From positions that speak of their own experience, such as this article of The Washington Post to Tips for facing long delays that leave us alone before the night without a place to sleep. Of the man who was 14 years living in a Chinese airport at Unipersonal Cabinas that are distributed by their facilities to put a head or sleeping spaces more than $ 100 a night at Dubai airport.

Aware of the problems they can represent, the airport managers themselves have been putting obstacles to prevent people from sleeping in their facilities. From a greater police presence to seat benches with armrests Each or two seats that prevent a person from lying in them.

The other side of the currency is represented by airports where facilities are put to the rest of the passengers, with sun loungers even in common spaces. If you go to sleep at a European airport, you know that Sleeping in Airports I recommend doing it in Helsinki’s.

Photo | Ray Sangga Kusuma

In Xataka | The great challenge of the successor of the Concorde will be to dominate the sonic patterning: there are those who believe that we are close to getting it