In 1950, amateur photographer Vicente Nieto Canedo took a photo of a maths teacher who was working at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Gráficas in Chamberí. It was so unusual to see a Black teacher that Canedo understood this an important moment to capture.
Alcalá de Henares, just an hour from Madrid, is a city steeped in history and proud of it; it is the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes and Catherine of Aragon and every year holds the largest Medieval market in Europe. But beyond the guidebook tales, the quaint Calle Mayor and the beautifully-manicured squares lies the real Alcalá, where a no-frills paradise awaits. Let me take you on a tour of my town and help you discover some of its lesser-known historical treasures.
Over 75,000 Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) have been installed across Europe, marking where victims of Nazi war camps last lived by choice. Each small golden stone bears the name of the victim, their date of birth, the date of their camp deportation and when their lives ended – there are so far 12 in Madrid.
Instagram account Visit Spain 1970 arose from an accidental discovery of tourist materials from the 1960s and 1970s found in a Rastro bookstore earlier this year.
Along the Avenida de Pablo Iglesias in the north-west barrio of Buenas Vistas lies the aqueduct of Amaniel, a half-buried vestige of one of the most important engineering projects ever made in Spain.
Worn paths strewn with broken bricks, bits of marble, litter and syringes crisscross the dusty land behind the building’s graffiti-scrawled bricks. A small temple-like structure draws the eye to the highest point. Inside it stands a battered five-foot tall white marble statue of the Virgin Mary, votive candles and carefully tended five-gallon buckets of red roses at her feet.
Remember when we were only allowed to stroll within one kilometre of our home, and when no bars, no restaurants and only a few shops were open? A beauty of being restricted to roaming nothing but the streets is that it led to one woman to documenting the open-air art gallery on her doorstep in the neighbourhood of Tetuán.
El Alamín, meaning ‘the world’ in Arabic, is an abandoned village on the outskirts of Madrid. A walk along the three streets of El Alamín reveals the world that a pro-Franco solider intended to build there in 1956. Juan Claudio Güell y Churruca, also known as the fourth Marquis de Comillas, fought on the national side during the Spanish Civil War. His militant legacy influenced the utilitarian architecture and planning of El Alamín: it’s of a communist-style with a touch of Christianity, established to populate tobacco and cotton farmers.
Madrid-based writer and artist Lauren Klarfeld combines her love for the streets of Madrid with the people who walk them, and in this article, she reveals her secret project, Last Words For The Road.
In 1965, Spain’s tourism board published a handbook to Spain. It would become a highly collectable item of Franco’s ‘Visit Spain’ campaign – one of the dictator’s lasting legacies, seeding the mass tourism we’re so familiar with today.
In 1919 – the year of its inauguration – Madrid’s metro consisted of just one line with eight charming little stations. Exactly 100 years later, this vast subterranean labyrinth is the seventh-longest underground system in the world and hosts around two million journeys every day.
There’s a bunker, a hidden chess club, a haunting forest and a forgotten city-centre zoo, among a few other secrets held by the gatekeeper of Retiro Park. But dive in with the darkest, most disturbing secret of all: the ‘human zoo’…
Futurism had a mini renaissance during the Spanish Civil War. The traditionally fascist art movement was briefly revived in an unexpected and ironic manner: to protect the people from the fallout of General Francisco Franco’s air raids.
The sun is setting and I’ve spotted some wild rabbits – their white flickering tails really give them away. They’re in an old trench digging diagonally into the pebbly soil, but possess no knowledge or concern over the possibility that they might be nesting alongside dismembered skeletons.
I’ve spotted a growing movement on Instagram, and I seem to be part of it. Welcome to the Spanish community of retro typography hunters, who are acting fast to preserve Spain’s unlikely works of street art.