Culture

Culture

Meet Madrid’s veteran micromerchants

26 April 2019

They're perfectly placed should you spontaneously decide to get your shoes shined, grab a bag of chestnuts or pick up a newspaper, but these gifts of the street are rewarded only to those who slow down. Allow yourself an extra five minutes to get to the nearest no-frills bar, and you'll witness our streets come alive with a multi-generational community of micro shops.

Haunting exhibition of the places Madrid has lost

3 April 2019

Welcome to the untimely ossuary of Madrid's extinct shops, bars and restaurants – an emotive collection of defunct signage from Madrid's long-lost traditional businesses.

Culture

Behind the gates of Madrid’s secret, historical gardens

21 March 2019

Our city gardens are something to be treasured dearly, with so many being lost over the years. Hundreds of grassy nooks and micro orchards have become victim to our ever-expanding metropolis, leaving those that remain with an almost mythical status.

Culture

Welcome to Madrid’s underground music scene

6 February 2019

What's popular on the Spanish radio is a world away from what's cooking beneath the surface. Funk, flamenco, Latin jazz and trap have all leapt into the limelight, but there's a part of Madrid's music scene that stubbornly resists going mainstream, even if it might be growing.

Culture

Miss Beige: “I dare to be who I am”

1 February 2019

Meet Miss Beige, a feminist, anarchist madrileña after all our hearts. She's a common girl living in her own beige world, and she'll spit pipas at anyone who tells her to smile.

Culture

Latest obsession: confessionals

11 January 2019

I've got a confession to make: I'm a little bit obsessed with confessionals. I suspect this might be one of the weirdest things a priest could ever be told through a latticed window, but although I have no intention of repenting my curiosity-related sins, an explanation might be helpful…

Culture

Magic beneath the streets of Lavapiés

10 December 2018

In a dark cellar, just around the corner from the Lavapiés dungeon, a young Madrileño is enchanting people with his magic three times a week. His spellbinding illusions may not have been thrust onto the underground stage at all had it not been for hard times, but this sombre era in Spanish history is inspiring a new movement and Carlos Devanti is a driving force behind it.

Culture

The ‘secret’ Lavapiés jazz club

8 October 2018

Those hermetic voile curtains are partly to preserve Café El Despertar's clandestine atmosphere, they're but mostly there to deter the naive walk-in customer. The steely elderly owner, with his enviable beard, is interested only in clientele who are specifically here for his jazz music, and most certainly not the police, who, for good reason, he constantly fears.

Culture

The Duck Church of Lavapiés

15 July 2018

Unless you live on this quiet, narrow street in Lavapiés, there's almost no reason for you to walk down it – that is, unless you're going to the Duck Church. Nestled into the ground floor of a centenarian building lives a tiny temple devoted to the rubber duck, and its priest is Leo Bassi, a 66-year-old clown who was born on tour.

Culture

Casa Postal: Madrid’s very own cabinet of curiosities

9 July 2018

Casa Postal is an unfinished, no-frills cabinet of curiosities that will transport you back to your childhood, your mother's childhood, your grandmother's childhood and beyond if you let your imagination take you there.

Culture

The story of the old rocking chair told through illustrations by Nathan Brenville

3 July 2018

Nathan Brenville likes to explore his local barrio with sketchbook in hand, believing that drawing is the best way to notice the details of his surroundings. While doing so, it often leads to some interesting conversations with passers-by, which is exactly how Nathan met Encarni.

71 enchanting years of Bodegas Jiménez

27 June 2018

When I asked Jose Luis Jiménez who the people in the photographs were, he spent the next half hour telling me stories from his childhood and showing me pictures taken by his friends from all over the world.

The 128-year-old Chueca hideout for generations of simmering lefties

20 June 2018

"Do you know about El Comunista? It's painted Ruby red for people who can't read – just like the other bodegas – and when you step inside, you'll see the Spain my great-grandparents knew"

Culture

The Outsider Artist building a life-size cathedral set for demolition

28 May 2018

Ex-monk Don Justo survived the Spanish Civil War and even tuberculosis, yet at 93 years old, he knows doesn't have long left. He's just a decade away from completing his 60-year mission to build a life-size cathedral, but when the local city council want it demolished, the question becomes, 'who will outlive who?'

The last horchata kiosk in Madrid

21 May 2018

My obsession with horchata began exactly where it should: on the coast of Valencia, surrounded by orange blossom and flamingos. On my return to Madrid, I vowed never to rest until I'd found the best horchata in town, and there it was – as it has been for 74 years – in a little roadside kiosk run by the fifth generation of the same family.