Plaza de Lavapiés: Manolos, Markets and Many Languages

Why is it significant?

Listen before you look. In this sloping square, under the trees, you might hear Spanish, Bengali, Wolof, Arabic, Chinese and Italian within a single minute, while old men argue on a bench and children kick a ball against the dark modern wall of the Teatro Valle-Inclán.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Listen before you look. In this sloping square, under the trees, you might hear Spanish, Bengali, Wolof, Arabic, Chinese and Italian within a single minute, while old men argue on a bench and children kick a ball against the dark modern wall of the Teatro Valle-Inclán.

On the way here you passed the Mercado de San Fernando, the neighbourhood market, and it tells the story of this quarter in miniature. For generations every barrio in Madrid fed itself from its own market: your butcher, your fishmonger, your fruit seller, who knew exactly what your family ate and how much you could spend. When supermarkets emptied many of the stalls, neighbours, cooperatives and young traders moved in, and today salt cod and pigs' trotters share the aisles with craft beer, second-hand books and kitchens from half the world.

Go back two and a half centuries, and Lavapiés was already the kingdom of the manolos and manolas: working-class Madrileños famous for their swagger, their flashy clothes, their sharp humour and their absolute conviction that they were the true Madrid. Their great rivals were the chisperos, the blacksmiths' lads from the northern quarters around Barquillo and Maravillas. Goya painted their world, and playwrights filled the stage with their quarrels, dances and wit.

Two centuries later, the newcomers came from much further away. From the late twentieth century, immigrants from Bangladesh, Senegal, Morocco, China and Latin America made Lavapiés their first home in Madrid. Walk down Calle de Lavapiés and you will find one of the densest strings of South Asian restaurants in Spain. This is where many Madrileños tasted their first curry, a few steps from a tavern serving callos. The manolos would have hated the competition... and probably loved the food.

The theatre on the square, opened in 2006, belongs to Spain's National Drama Centre, which feels right in a place that has always performed itself. Now walk a couple of minutes east, slightly uphill, to a modest church on Calle del Doctor Piga that carries the oldest legend of the neighbourhood.