The police in Lavapiés are not here to protect us

On Good Friday morning in Lavapiés, two young black men were filmed by a passerby being violently forced to the ground by police officers. One officer placed a man in a chokehold position while another officer beat his lower back until he was flat on the ground.

The barrio of Pan Bendito has the lowest life expectancy in Madrid – here’s the data

Pan Bendito is a small pentagonal barrio in east Carabanchel, 6km from Sol. The name originates from the wheat fields on which it was built in 1963 to accommodate rural Spanish migrants who had arrived during Madrid’s industrial boom in the decades before. They’d previously been living in one of Madrid’s 30,000 shantytowns and vertical slums.

Madrid’s DANA disaster shows why weather warnings require trust

A DANA (a mass of high-altitude cold air mixes with warm humid air from the Mediterranean) hit Spain yesterday, affecting Madrid and Toledo the worst. Emergency services responded to around 1,500 incidents of people trapped in their cars and homes, which left two people dead and two more missing.

New study reveals Madrid has the worst Urban Heat Island Effect

Urban Heat Snapshot (UHS), a research project by Arup university, studied and compared the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE) of six major cities: Cairo, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mumbai and New York. Results revealed that out of all six cities, Madrid’s UHIE was the most extreme.

Pool drama brings Madrid’s climate crisis to the surface

Pool tickets go on sale online 49 hours before doors open. Within two or three minutes, all 585 tickets to the city centre’s only public outdoor pool, Peñuelas, are gone. Over the past few weeks, a conspiracy theory grew that a few people were monopolising tickets, booking them quickly and then selling them off to their friends. The theory appeared partly true when a 400-strong neighbourhood WhatsApp group called ‘Peñuelas pool’ hit the headlines, with members being called a “mafia of families”.

New Year’s Eve Portrait of the Oldest Bakery in Madrid

Just around the corner from Sol, Antigua Pastelería El Pozo, on Calle Pozo, has been serving traditional pastries since 1830. The very frills bakery has kept its original frilly decor this whole time and the pastry chefs continue to use artisanal techniques.

Photographs of Valencia’s two historic floods: 1957 vs 2024

Going through the archives of Valencia's 1957 DANA, I realised I'd taken hauntingly similar photos just last week in Paiporta, so I decided to make direct comparisons by placing the images next to each other. What this compilation demonstrates is that the same mistakes have been made twice. Predatory urban planning ignoring the limits of our planet, combined with institutional incompetence has led to the destruction of thousands of lives, again.

Explore 250 of Madrid’s metro stations with this artist’s intricate drawings

The layout of stations directly impacts people's mobility. Some cities have taken intermodality (the desire to make using more than one mode of transport during a single journey as easy as possible) as a serious issue, while others have not given importance. Albert explains that there are several key aspects to ensure quality to the transfers: "distance, the lack of architectural barriers, timetable coordination and a good wayfinding system, among others."

Portrait of Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden workers

The Royal Botanical Gardens in Madrid turned 278 this year, and has become a living museum with over 5,500 living species. Since its founding, it's also been a centre for scientific research with a vast library of over a million flora samples which are constantly being exchanged with other research centres across the globe.