Ben Pawlowski
HEAD to Barcelona for a holiday and the advice is almost always the same – beware of the pickpockets, hide your valuables and keep your wits about you after dark.
But could the Catalan capital’s reputation as a hotspot for crime be unfair?
New statistics from the Barcelona Local Security Board suggest it could be, with overall crime rates falling by almost 9%.
Between January and June 2025, there were 83,646 recorded criminal offences in the city, 8.8% fewer than the same period in 2024.
Even theft – long the scourge of tourists and locals alike – has dropped by 6.8% to its lowest level in over a decade.
That includes a 5.5% fall in violent street robberies, a 31.4% drop in residential burglaries and a 35.6% decline in thefts from vehicles.
Crimes committed by repeat offenders have fallen by 10%, while offences related to squatting fell by 21.9%.
One study appears to back up the statistics, with the perceived safety rating of the city increasing to 5.5 from 5.3 in 2024.
But some 41.4% of residents said safety in the city had worsened over the past twelve months, compared to just 8.6% who said it had improved.
That may be down to eye-watering increases in reports of sexual violence, assaults and knife attacks.
According to the report, 607 cases of sexual violence were reported in the city between January and June 2025, representing a 17.4% rise from the same period last year.
That includes an eye-watering 30.7% uptick in gender-based sexual assaults.
Elsewhere, assaults that led to injury climbed 7.2% to 2,448, even though the number of murders halved from ten to five.
But perhaps the most worrying trend to emerge from the report is a staggering upturn in knife-based crime.
Knife-related incidents surged by 38.3% in the first six months of 2025, with the Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalunya’s police force, confiscating 1,844 knives and blades in the same period – a whopping 48.5% rise.
The report also pulled back the curtain on the Mossos’ efforts to cripple the city’s narcotics industry.
In total, 1,280 arrests have been made in connection with drug dealing, representing a 23.9% increase.
That has led to the police seizing a mammoth 217kg of marijuana, 122kg of hashish, 4.3kg of cocaine, 6.62kg of MDMA, 2.23kg of methamphetamine, 323g of ketamine, 300g of crack cocaine and 534g of heroin.
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