“Before coming to Madrid, I had moved twice. At 15, I moved from my hometown, Rio de Janeiro, to New York City, and at 18, I moved from New York to Florence to start my academic
journey.
With a desire for learning Spanish, my academic journey now brought me to Spain. As I arrived in Malasaña, my new home for the next year, I eagerly looked for authentic products and
experiences. However, what I saw was an excessive amount of stores that felt familiar.
Brunch spots like “Brunch it” and “Billy Brunch” had menus that resembled Los Angeles or New York, and vintage shops dominated the streets, which during weekends, together with the centro area, can expect up to a million visitors.
As I grappled with these familiar sites, I realised that tourism was obfuscating the city’s authenticity. The popularity of Malasaña nearly made the neighbourhood feel fake.
Except that Malasaña isn’t fake; it’s just complex. The barrio is famous for being the birthplace of the Movida movement in Spain, a cultural revolution that sparked in the 80s after the fall of the Spanish dictatorship. Ever since then, it has been a hub of creativity, which is still clear through the abundance of art galleries, bars, and cool shops one can find.
Similarly, if you walk one street east of Malasaña, the crowds won’t stop, as you will arrive in Chueca, also made popular in the 80s and known as the hype gay neighbourhood of Madrid.
While these barrios have evolved since those times, they seem to take with them a tradition of modernism and progressive mindset, which impels them to constantly evolve and harbour diversity.
Given the complexity of these famous neighbourhoods, Madrid made more sense as I left the tourist hubs and visited places like Tetuan, a predominantly residential part of town. This area is also adapting to the impacts of gentrification, but it still has a clear personality.
Walking there, one isn’t bombarded by American-catered day-trip stores with ready-to-eat meals. Instead, I found ingredient-focused stores from both Spanish and Latin American cuisines—catering to the Latin American immigrants who live there.
As I came back to Malasaña, I started to understand the history underneath all the tourism. Slowly, I noticed locals frequenting their historic old churches, I saw artifacts in century-old family shops, and I frequented real Movida bars.
Turns out, the diversity within my barrio that made it feel fake at first was the authenticity I was looking for. Malasaña and Chueca don’t have one era to them; they have multiple layers of history, which reflects in the structure of their calles, as one can see a kebab shop, next to an original farmacia, next to a sex shop.
A city cannot be measured by 15-second clips on social media and cannot be known by a list of “Top 10 things to do in Madrid”. There is a way to see what truly lies in a city, but one must really want to find it.
Nowadays, many prioritise the artificial, money-oriented experience—like getting avocado toast for breakfast at a famous TikTok shop—over sourcing a morning pan con tomate at a predominantly Spanish cafeteria.
Experiencing only the expected has distanced us from the layers of history a city carries.
We keep thinking that asking technology to summarize the unknown for us is an ‘easier’ way to navigate a new town, when in fact it’s holding us back, and things like the Real Madrid are
becoming harder to find.”
Front Photo Credit: Alice Ellis