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No Frills
- “I’m tired”: our naïve nostalgia for Madrid’s no-frills bars
  
  The Madrid No Frills Prints Collection
  
  Gracias por su visita: A no-frills photography project about the Spanish tortilla
  
  Seven no-frills decades of Estrecho’s Bar Los Pepes
  
  The art of being a Madrid muse
Spotlight
- How Madrid’s social housing crisis turns paying tenants into “illegal squatters”
  
  The Cañada Real: “Electricity is not a privilege, it’s a right”
  
  Life under lockdown in a Greek refugee camp
  
  Celebrating the voices of Barrio La Guindalera
  
  Empty Spain: The Valley of Fornela
Living Museums
- The House of Suitcases
  
  The little pastry shop celebrating Madrid’s changing seasons
  
  Madrid’s Human Beehive
  
  The churrerías preserving Madrid’s disappearing street food culture
  
  Madrid’s golden age of commercial ceramic art
Lost & Found
- Visit Spain in the 1970s via a box of postcards found in El Rastro
  
  Discover the juxtaposed remains of Madrid’s 170-year-old aqueduct
  
  The story of Madrid’s hidden (and noseless) Virgin Mary statue
  
  Map created under lockdown locates all graffiti artworks in Tetuán
  
  The secret street stickers of Madrid’s people
Let’s talk
- Snow in the Cañada
  
  How Madrid’s social housing crisis turns paying tenants into “illegal squatters”
  
  Selective confinement reawakens Vallekas’ ancient spirit of resistance
  
  We need to talk about racism towards Madrid’s Chinese community
  
  We need to talk about Madrid’s ‘Tourist Saviour Complex’
Activism
- The power and art of protest photography
  
  Selective confinement reawakens Vallekas’ ancient spirit of resistance
  
  As Lavapiés’ food banks endure, it’s time to get involved
  
  Fighting for the future of El Rastro
  
  #Regularización Ya: The Spain movement calling for an end to institutional racism
Prints
- The Madrid No Frills Prints Collection
About

HOME
No Frills
- “I’m tired”: our naïve nostalgia for Madrid’s no-frills bars
  
  The Madrid No Frills Prints Collection
  
  Gracias por su visita: A no-frills photography project about the Spanish tortilla
  
  Seven no-frills decades of Estrecho’s Bar Los Pepes
  
  The art of being a Madrid muse
Spotlight
- How Madrid’s social housing crisis turns paying tenants into “illegal squatters”
  
  The Cañada Real: “Electricity is not a privilege, it’s a right”
  
  Life under lockdown in a Greek refugee camp
  
  Celebrating the voices of Barrio La Guindalera
  
  Empty Spain: The Valley of Fornela
Living Museums
- The House of Suitcases
  
  The little pastry shop celebrating Madrid’s changing seasons
  
  Madrid’s Human Beehive
  
  The churrerías preserving Madrid’s disappearing street food culture
  
  Madrid’s golden age of commercial ceramic art
Lost & Found
- Visit Spain in the 1970s via a box of postcards found in El Rastro
  
  Discover the juxtaposed remains of Madrid’s 170-year-old aqueduct
  
  The story of Madrid’s hidden (and noseless) Virgin Mary statue
  
  Map created under lockdown locates all graffiti artworks in Tetuán
  
  The secret street stickers of Madrid’s people
Let’s talk
- Snow in the Cañada
  
  How Madrid’s social housing crisis turns paying tenants into “illegal squatters”
  
  Selective confinement reawakens Vallekas’ ancient spirit of resistance
  
  We need to talk about racism towards Madrid’s Chinese community
  
  We need to talk about Madrid’s ‘Tourist Saviour Complex’
Activism
- The power and art of protest photography
  
  Selective confinement reawakens Vallekas’ ancient spirit of resistance
  
  As Lavapiés’ food banks endure, it’s time to get involved
  
  Fighting for the future of El Rastro
  
  #Regularización Ya: The Spain movement calling for an end to institutional racism
Prints
- The Madrid No Frills Prints Collection
About

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george orwell

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Latest Posts

“I’m tired”: our naïve nostalgia for Madrid’s no-frills bars
11 January 2021
Snow in the Cañada
8 January 2021
How Madrid’s social housing crisis turns paying tenants into “illegal squatters”
27 December 2020
Visit Spain in the 1970s via a box of postcards found in El Rastro
9 December 2020
The House of Suitcases
4 December 2020

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I felt my building rumble and thought it was an ea

I felt my building rumble and thought it was an earthquake, so I headed out to find that tragically there'd been a catastrophic gas explosion during a boiler inspection at a building on Calle Toledo.

Thoughts are with all those lost, injured, still missing and still waiting for news.

To Madrid's incredible emergency services who are making the area safe, for moving the Abuelxs who live next door over to the hotel nearby, and to the local bars where staff and neighbours who can't get home are sheltering ♥️

If I find out there's anything more that can be done to help, I'll keep you informed via this post.

#madridexplosion #calletoledo

💡 Today marks day 110 days without electricity

💡 Today marks day 110 days without electricity in the Cañada and the streets are still covered in ice and snow. There has been one official fatality of an elderly man, and numerous residents are in hospital due to butane poisoning caused by trying to find a makeshift way to heat their homes.

❄️ The latest victim is a three-year-old girl whose ventilator froze. The council has offered the girl’s family a flat in the nearby town of Tielmes, but as the town doesn’t have a health centre, the girl's parents have been left with no choice but to reject the offer in hope for an alternative, which has still not been found.

📢 “Personally, I think this situation goes beyond racism and aporophobia”, explains a member of youth association @juventud_canada. “I believe that it’s because we live in a capitalist world and the soil of the Cañada is more important than the people who live in it.”

🏗️ It’s reported that several developers plan to build new housing on the land the Cañada occupies. And it’s for this reason that the girl’s family don’t want to leave the Cañada because they’re worried that upon their return, their house will have been taken from them. They accept this risk because they have no alternative to keep their daughter safe, but what they really want is for their electricity to be switched back on.

🚨 The Madrid City Council and Regional government have now ignored all of the above as well as advice, pleas and demands from the UN, Save the Children, a number of NGOs, petitions, official complaints, media pressure and over 4,000 Cañada residents, as well as widespread public outcry.

💖 Beautiful illustration by @eljoart of a toddler in Sector 6 clutching his toys as the snow falls around him last week, ispired by a photo by @diego.radames.

🚨 Lavapiés eviction tomorrow morning, 9 am 🚨

Widowed mother, Eva, and her three children (6, 11 & 20) two of whom are little dragons of @dragoneslavapies are being evicted by the Madrid City Council tomorrow morning from this building on Plaza Nelson Mandela, the only place these kids have ever called home.

This building is one of the last remaining social housing blocks in Lavapiés.

If you can, go, record what's happening on your phone and share it across social media. Show your outrage at yet another eviction during the Covid-19 pandemic (and at evictions at all) and keep up the momentum because protest, online and in-person, works ✊

📍 Calle Meson de Paredes 39, 1A

🛑 Stay informed via @pahcentromadrid.

🌹The body of a man has emerged from beneath the

🌹The body of a man has emerged from beneath the melting snow today in Madrid, in Barrio Arganzuela. We don’t know how long he’d been there, and it’s believed that he died from the freezing temperatures.

During Madrid’s fortnight-long deep freeze which we’re still in, @samursocial have been able to open up just 559 beds for people sleeping on the street, despite there being around 3,000 people sleeping rough, at the last count. Many of these beds, however, are in hostels that are far away from the city centre where the majority of homeless people sleep, and with the bad weather making it difficult to access the hostels, four central metro stations have opened up overnight for them to escape freezing temperatures.

But even once they’d escaped the snow and were fortunately allowed to bring inside their belongings and pets, provisions inside the stations have been minimal and undignified, with people being allowed to simply sleep on the tiled floor. It was you who brought blankets, food, hot drinks and clean clothes, and if you’d like to keep up our neighbourhood solidarity, stay informed via @asociacion_bokatas.

If you see a homeless person, ask them what they need. I've also been told that they need clean, dry clothes, including socks and underwear. The fountains in Madrid are still switched off as an arbitrary Covid-19 measure, so they need water too.

Unfortunately I'm unable to confirm if metro stations Tirso, Opera, Estación del Arte and La Latina will be open tonight for rough sleepers but I will update this post when I can.

If you have any questions, @asociacion_bokatas are well informed, but also feel free to comment or DM me and I’ll do my best to give you a helpful answer.

Keep helping, keep raising awareness of homelessness and keep doing what you do because it's so so necessary ♥️

“Why don’t people just get a shovel and clear

“Why don’t people just get a shovel and clear the snow themselves?"

“People expect municipal services to do everything."

“Stop being cry-babies, it's just a bit of snow."

To all those who said, thought or had to listen to the above, here’s one response:

We don’t have shovels because we live in a densely populated urban area which streamlines the provision of public services. It was part of the post-war model that brought millions from rural areas to work in urban hubs, and this shift continues today with over 80% of Spain’s population living in cities. More arrived today and more will arrive tomorrow.

We left our families behind for work, especially in Madrid, a city of migrants. Family is no longer the basic unit of social security – public services are designed to take their place. That was the post-war model, but with every cut to public services, the deal we subscribed to is further broken.

As hard labour becomes increasingly automated and the urban workforce shifts towards service work, manual skills don’t seem necessary but, of course, we still need them. Public services are supposed to be our family unit – a big family unit that we all chip into and use. But as cuts shrink it and leave us without the help we need, especially in a time of crisis, we turn to our next closest family: our neighbours.

Some of us had shovels leftover from a renovation, some porters had one in the basement just in case. Most of us had brooms whose handles we used to chip ice, and some with spare cash were able to buy up the two or three shovels gathering dust at the local DIY store. And some of us are strong, so we cleared paths for our more vulnerable neighbours. But none of us were equipped for what Filomena brought and nor should we have been: public services were supposed to be there for us, because what individual can afford a snow plough?

Cuts to public services affect the poorest in society first – those without a shovel, a car, a home. Shifting responsibility to the individuals and communities is dangerous: it shifts the blame for failure too and undermines the whole idea of collective provision of public services as a public good.

The incredible unmeltable Snow Abuelx of Vallekas!

The incredible unmeltable Snow Abuelx of Vallekas! ⛄🤘

📍 Currently overseeing the top of the Calle Peña Gorbea boulevard for at least another week 🔭

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