Portugal // The Libertarian Culture Center needs our solidarity~ 2 min

The Popular Party gave us the new Rent Law, the Social Democratic Party gave us golden visas and the Socialist Party the blueprint for the Disneyland-city. Their goal was to transform cities into sponges for international capital. Housing speculation, out of control tourism and the social purge of the local working population was the small price to pay. One of the least talked about consequence of this process is the slow strangulation of common spaces.

A short while ago we lost the Friends of Minho Association in Lisbon (Amigos do Minho). This space always kept its doors open to anyone who might need a room to meet, organize or do a presentation. Its irreproachable old guard collective maintained a building which was sold, resold and finally turned into another hostel. One more factory to extract money from imbecile tourist looking for “authentic” experiences.

We already lost the Living House (Casa Viva) in Porto. The Vagabond Cat (Gato Vadio) is headed the same way, since the landlady has her eye set on better applications of her capital. Both spaces hosted countless political events during their lifetime, including the presentations Guilhotina organized about PAH (Affected by Mortgages Platform) in 2014.

In 2014, when we were gathering funds to organize these presentations, CCL (Libertarian Culture Center – Libertarian as in Anarchist, not the free market and guns kind) was one of the locations that opened its door to us.

And in other occasions, they even opened their doors to our nonsense.

An important meeting and organizing space, maintained with dedication for 44 years, home to an enormous historical estate, CCL is now at risk. Located in Cacilhas, Almada, it’s therefore in one of the hot spots of the social purge emanating from Lisbon. This means that rents are going to increase beyond current capacity to pay.

But CCL has no intentions of ending. To ensure that it doesn’t, they are organizing a crowdfunding campaign to allow them to maintain the current space or move to a new location with better conditions to organize activities and generate more income.

If you can, please contribute to help CCL keep its doors open for many more years. The appeal can also be consulted in English and Spanish.