Barbara Fodor from Hungary is one of those people who try to make the place she found herself in better. In Spain, she offers free deep-cleaning services with her husband to people in difficult life circumstances. She runs a blog in which she shows her work to the world. Content showing dramatic “before and after” transformations and the personal stories of the people living in these homes has attracted tens of thousands of followers and millions of views. La Cotorra tells the story of Barbara and the people she has met along the way.
Barbara helps people who have found themselves in serious difficulty due to illness, depression, or just loneliness, for free. According to her, cleaning is not just about tidying up, but about giving back a space where people can feel alive again. Barbara took inspiration from a Finnish blogger. Her husband helps her with her work.
Originally from Hungary, Barbara spent many years living in New York, a city she found to be very dirty. A few months ago, she and her family moved to Torrevieja in the Valencian region, taking a fresh start in a better climate. Spain, Barbara says, is noticeably cleaner, though not without its flaws. “I noticed straight away that not everyone picks up after their dogs, and there’s often rubbish lying around, especially in tourist areas,” she says.
The Valencian Community, she adds, is one of the top destinations for foreigners moving to Spain. But that popularity comes with a hidden cost: many people end up far away from their families and support networks, and loneliness, especially among older residents, can be a serious problem.
Barbara’s experience shows that there are cases where a person can go unnoticed for decades, neither by neighbours nor by the state services.
In New York, Barbara’s first clients found her through social media, where she promoted her work via ads on different platforms. After moving to Spain, she began promoting herself in local Facebook groups. After three posts, Torrevieja’s social services noticed her, which was a surprise for Barbara
“They found me and asked for help because I’m the only person who does this for free,” Barbara says. “The local authorities simply didn’t have the budget to pay for this kind of work.”
The first case is one she describes as among the most difficult of her entire career. The social services referred her to Jacqueline, a 71-year-old British woman who has lived in Spain for more than twenty years. After her husband died, she was left completely alone and gradually stopped coping with even basic household upkeep. “I had never seen anything like it,” Barbara recalls.
Jacqueline was living on her own, without running water or electricity. The flat was in an extreme state of neglect. After a plumbing failure in the bathroom, she began collecting waste in plastic bottles and storing them inside her home. Barbara and her husband removed around 2,400 litres of biological waste from the apartment.
Even more troubling, however, was Jacqueline’s legal situation. She did not have Spanish residency status and, for many years, had effectively become invisible to the state system, slipping through the cracks of public services.
“Almost no one knew anything about her,” Barbara says. “Jacqueline has two children, but they live in England and are no longer in contact with her. She is seriously ill, yet receives no medical care at all. She doesn’t speak Spanish. Many British people ran into similar problems after the UK left the European Union — they carried on living as usual, without sorting out the necessary paperwork, and then suddenly found themselves cut off from healthcare and social services.”.
After cleaning up the flat, Barbara continues to visit Jacqueline and buy her groceries. She hopes that the local authorities will be able to help her out of the bureaucratic dead end, so that she can finally access social support and medical care.
Barbara's second client was also referred by the city’s social services. An 82-year-old British man, Neil, was living alone in a severely cluttered house. He had legal residency status and a pension, but neither protected him from loneliness or mounting difficulties. Firstly, Barbara visited Neil in a hospital as he had undergone surgery shortly before they were introduced.
“To start working, I need to talk to the person, get to know them, understand what happened to them and why they are living like this. It’s also important to get consent to shoot a video,” Barbara explains. “When I lived in the US, people found me by themselves. They would send photos of their homes, and I would decide whether to take the case or not, because I have my own criteria.”
Barbara adds that she does not work with people who do not want to get rid of large amounts of rubbish in their homes. “In those cases, cleaning doesn’t solve the problem, because the resistance to cleaning comes from a fear of losing support — a role that unnecessary objects have gradually come to play,” she says.
Barbara keeps her own records of how her clients’ lives unfold after a clean-up. Based on her experience, around nineteen out of twenty people eventually slip back into their previous state, and only one manages to hold on to the result and truly get their life back on track.
“Cleaning doesn’t cure depression or solve health problems,” Barbara says. “It can give a person a chance, lift some of the burden and spark motivation. But without therapy, support and changing habits, everything eventually comes back.”
During cleaning, some of the people she works with start helping Barbara, and she sees this as a good sign. If she is working in the living room and someone starts cleaning their bedroom at the same time, it means that they have become motivated — and have a chance of keeping things tidy after Barbara leaves. For some people, meeting her is a turning point in their lives. They write to Barbara about their improvements and send Christmas presents.
Barbara recalls several similar stories from New York that stuck in her mind. One of them involved a woman from Colombia who owned 13 cats. After meeting Barbara, she managed to sort through some of her belongings on her own and clean her home herself.
“She said that she now wants to live in a clean home. That came as a surprise to me, and I was genuinely happy about that turn of events,” Barbara says.
Another case was a young American couple who were struggling to organise their everyday lives. After Barbara’s clean-up, they managed to reset and start again from scratch.
“Later on, I randomly came across their TikTok,” Barbara recalls. “They had moved to Texas, rented a beautiful flat and had really managed to turn things around.”
Today, Barbara runs several social media accounts across different platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
She especially values messages from followers who say her content has helped them cope with their own difficulties. One subscriber, for example, wrote to her: “Barbie, after watching your videos, I finally started cleaning my own home.”
Messages like these are becoming much more common.
Barbara battled severe depression and suicidal thoughts in her youth. She believes this experience is what allows her to truly understand others and offer help without prejudice. “I know that after my clean-ups, most people will eventually return to their old state,” she says. “But I also know that sometimes a single ‘before and after’ is enough for someone to see, for the first time in a while, that life can be different.”
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