SEVILLE, Spain — Along one of the windy streets of Seville’s historic Santa Cruz neighborhood, Alfonso José Carnerero Ávila, a hotel employee, was enjoying a drink with colleagues and friends on the doorstep of a wine cellar on a recent day, trying hard to ignore the overflowing pile of trash nearby.

The plastic garbage bags were stacked chest high. Some were torn open. Many had been there for more than a week. “This is really becoming disgusting,” Mr. Carnerero Ávila said. “We’re already in an unemployment crisis and most of us here still have work thanks to the tourists, so the last thing we can afford is to scare visitors away.”

Seville is in the midst of a strike by garbage collectors that is entering its second week and is threatening to turn into a health crisis. In recent days, the strike has been accompanied by a growing sense of menace, as more than 100 garbage containers have been set on fire during the night. So far, the authorities have attributed the fires to random acts of vandalism.

The labor dispute started last month after the 1,600 employees of Lipasam, the municipal street cleaning company, rejected a plan to reduce their wages by 5 percent while increasing their working hours, conditions that city officials are demanding to comply with the Spanish government’s demand that local authorities balance their books.