From the Dos de Mayo to La Movida: Malasaña & Chueca, Madrid's Rebel Quarters

Cannons in 1808, electric guitars in 1980, Pride flags today: a walk through Madrid's loudest neighbourhoods, from a painted church and tiled shopfronts to the court where a queen's harpsichord teacher wrote five hundred sonatas

Madrid · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated

  1. 1. San Antonio de los Alemanes: Madrid's Painted Oval

    Calle de la Puebla 22, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Step from the plain brick street into an oval of colour: every wall and every inch of the dome painted with saints, angels, kings and false architecture that seems to rise forever. Madrileños sometimes call this church their own Sistine Chapel, and from the first second you can see why.

    The name is a riddle. Saint Anthony of the Germans, in the middle of Madrid? In the early 1600s Spain and Portugal shared one king, and Philip the Third founded a hospital here for poor Portuguese, with a church dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua, who was born in Lisbon. When Portugal broke away in 1640, a Portuguese hospital in Madrid became awkward. A few decades later, Queen Mariana of Austria handed it to the Catholics of the German lands, and the strange name stuck.

    The oval church went up in the 1620s and 1630s, and the painting came later in the century. Francisco Rizi and Juan Carreño de Miranda covered the dome, and the walls were finished by the Neapolitan Luca Giordano, a painter so fast that Italians nicknamed him Luca fa presto, Luca does it quickly. The miracles of Saint Anthony unfold above your head, while painted saintly kings and queens of Europe watch from below.

    Since the early eighteenth century the church has belonged to the Hermandad del Refugio, a charitable brotherhood with a remarkable tradition. For centuries its members went out at night through the dark streets with lanterns, picking up the sick, the homeless and the abandoned, and handing out bread and a boiled egg. Madrid called it the ronda de pan y huevo, the round of bread and egg, and the brotherhood still runs its charity from here.

    Remember this quiet before you go, because the streets just north of here are the loudest in Madrid. This walk follows two revolutions: one fought with cannons in 1808, the other with electric guitars around 1980. Head north into the grid of Malasaña to the corner of Calle de San Andrés and Calle de San Vicente Ferrer, and keep your eyes on the walls.

  2. 2. Calle de San Vicente Ferrer: Tiled Shopfronts of Old Maravillas

    Calle de San Vicente Ferrer, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Ignore the shop windows for a moment and study the walls at this corner: panels of painted ceramic tiles, in blue, yellow and green, advertising an old pharmacy and the cures it once promised for everyday ailments, with curly lettering and little painted scenes. They are a hundred years old, give or take, and they have outlived almost everything they advertised.

    Before neon signs and radio jingles, a tile panel was the smartest advertising a Madrid shopkeeper could buy. Rain could not wash it off, the sun could not fade it, and the whole street read it every day. In the early twentieth century, pharmacies, dairies, taverns and grocers across the city dressed their façades in ceramics. Most disappeared with the shops behind them. Walk along San Vicente Ferrer and the streets around it and you will spot the survivors.

    On paper this neighbourhood is called Universidad. Historically it was the Barrio de Maravillas, a quarter of artisans and of the chisperos, the blacksmiths' lads named after the sparks of their forges. By the 1960s and 1970s it had grown old and tired: crumbling flats, elderly tenants, shuttered shops, and very cheap rents.

    And cheap rents are where music begins. After Franco's death in 1975, students, painters, photographers and kids with second-hand guitars moved into these streets. Bars opened in former dairies and taverns, bands rehearsed in basements, fanzines were photocopied in kitchens. Within a few years this grid of narrow streets had become one of the cradles of what the world would call La Movida madrileña.

    There is a bitter irony in those pharmacy tiles. The same years that brought freedom also brought heroin, and the Movida generation lost many of its own to it. The neighbourhood remembers both. Now walk north up Calle de San Andrés into the square where this barrio's story really starts.

  3. 3. Plaza del Dos de Mayo: The Arch of Monteleón

    Plaza del Dos de Mayo, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Walk into the square and find the brick arch standing alone in the middle, a gateway that leads nowhere, with two stone officers standing beneath it. On a summer evening the benches around it are full of people with cans and guitars, and almost nobody looks at the arch. They should.

    On the second of May 1808, Madrid rose against the French troops occupying the city. On this spot stood the Monteleón artillery park, set in an old palace. Two artillery captains, Luis Daoíz and Pedro Velarde, had orders to stay neutral. Instead they opened the gates, handed weapons to the neighbours, and defended the barracks for hours against the French. Both were killed. The arch is the old entrance of that barracks, the last piece left standing, and the statues beneath it are Daoíz and Velarde. The executions that followed were later painted by Goya in The Second of May and The Third of May.

    And then there is Manuela Malasaña, a young seamstress, around seventeen years old, killed by French soldiers that day. The stories differ. One says she was carrying the scissors of her trade, and the French, who had banned all weapons, treated them as one. Another says she was helping her father bring ammunition to the defenders. Whatever happened, her name outlived the facts, and in the twentieth century this whole barrio began to be called Malasaña.

    A hundred and seventy years later, this square found a new kind of rebellion. Around 1980 it became the open-air living room of La Movida: bands, poets, photographers and night owls drifting between the bars of the surrounding streets, and the neighbourhood fiestas of the second of May turning into concerts. The same square, the same gate, a very different soundtrack.

    Look at the street names around you: Daoíz, Velarde, Manuela Malasaña. The whole grid is a memorial to one day. Now leave the square heading north-east, past Calle de Manuela Malasaña, to the busy roundabout of the Glorieta de Bilbao and its grand old café.

  4. 4. Café Comercial: Coffee, Chess and Tertulias since 1887

    Glorieta de Bilbao 7, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Take a look through the tall windows of the Café Comercial: marble-topped tables, mirrors, dark wood, waiters in a hurry and people who are clearly in no hurry at all. It has stood on this corner of the Glorieta de Bilbao since 1887, which makes it one of the oldest cafés in Madrid.

    To understand why it matters, you need to understand the tertulia. In nineteenth and early twentieth century Madrid, flats were small, dark and cold, and the café was everybody's living room. A tertulia was a group of regulars who met at the same table, at the same hour, every day or every week, to argue about literature, politics, bullfighting and each other. A single coffee could buy a whole afternoon, and more than one novel, magazine and political career was born at a café table in this city.

    Upstairs, for decades, there was a quieter kind of battle. The Comercial was famous for its chess players, who would sit for hours over the boards while the noise of the glorieta rolled on below them. Many cafés of that era also had a pianist or a small band, and music, conversation and the clatter of cups were the soundtrack of Madrid's evenings.

    In 2015 the café suddenly closed, and Madrid reacted almost as if a relative had died. Writers, regulars and neighbours protested, and the loss was front-page news. In 2017 it reopened after a careful restoration, keeping its long room and its atmosphere, and the tables filled up again as if nothing had happened.

    Think of it as the older brother of all the bars you have walked past. The Movida kids of 1980 did not invent the idea of meeting friends every night in the same place to change the world; they just turned the volume up. Now walk south down Calle de Fuencarral for a few minutes, to the most extravagant doorway in Madrid.

  5. 5. Museo de Historia de Madrid: Ribera's Wild Doorway

    Calle de Fuencarral 78, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Stop in front of this doorway and try to take it all in: stone curtains, twisting pilasters, flames, garlands, shields and cherubs, all bursting upward from a plain brick wall, with a saint in a niche at the very top. Next to the sober façades of Calle de Fuencarral, it looks like a firework frozen in granite.

    The doorway was designed in the 1720s by Pedro de Ribera, Madrid's most daring Baroque architect, for the Real Hospicio de San Fernando, the Royal Hospice. Behind it lived hundreds of the city's poor, orphans and beggars, who were housed, fed and put to work at looms. The saint at the top is King Ferdinand the Third, San Fernando. Later critics of Neoclassical taste despised this kind of exuberance and mocked Ribera's style for generations, yet the portal outlived its critics.

    Since 1929 the old hospice has been the city's history museum. Its star is a painting by Goya from 1810, the Allegory of the City of Madrid, with an oval medallion at its centre that tells the political history of Spain all by itself. It first showed a portrait of Joseph Bonaparte. Then it was painted over with the word Constitution, then Joseph came back, then Ferdinand the Seventh, until finally it was given the words Dos de Mayo. One canvas, repainted every time the regime changed.

    Inside there is also a huge scale model of Madrid made in 1830 by León Gil de Palacio, a whole city in miniature. And just around the corner, on Calle de la Palma, a small bar called El Penta opened in the mid-1970s and became one of the meeting places of the Movida's musicians and night owls, one more proof that in this neighbourhood the eighteenth century and the 1980s live wall to wall.

    Before you go, notice how tiny the people look beneath Ribera's door. That was the point: charity, made monumental. Now cross Calle de Fuencarral and head east along Calle de Barceló to a white building that looks like an ocean liner.

  6. 6. Teatro Barceló: The White Liner of Madrid Nights

    Calle de Barceló 11, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Face the white building with its smooth curved corner and long horizontal bands, like the bow of an ocean liner that has run aground in the middle of Madrid. It went up in 1930, designed by Luis Gutiérrez Soto, a young architect who was crazy about the modern movement, and it was built for films and shows.

    In 1930 this was the future. Madrid was building cinemas as fast as it could, and architects were trading ornament for clean lines, ribbon windows and rounded corners. The Barceló, with the covered market across the street, belonged to a city that believed it was becoming fully modern... a belief that the Civil War would interrupt six years later.

    Its second life began around 1980, when it became a nightclub and one of the temples of the Movida. To feel that moment, imagine Madrid after almost forty years of dictatorship: Franco dies in 1975, censorship collapses, the Constitution arrives in 1978, and suddenly teenagers can dye their hair green. Bands like Kaka de Luxe, Alaska y los Pegamoides, Radio Futura and Nacha Pop play with more nerve than technique. Pedro Almodóvar shoots his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom, in 1980. A tribute concert in February 1980 to Canito, a young drummer killed in a road accident, is often remembered as the starting gun.

    The Movida had an unlikely godfather: Enrique Tierno Galván, an elderly socialist professor elected mayor in 1979. Instead of frowning at the noise, he joked with the crowds at concerts, opened public spaces to young bands and became their favourite grandfather. When he died in 1986, an enormous crowd followed his funeral through the streets.

    The Movida burned fast and was mostly over by the end of the decade. But the freedom it shouted about stayed. Now walk a few steps further, around the corner into Calle de San Mateo, where a palace keeps the music of an earlier generation of rebels.

  7. 7. Museo del Romanticismo: Pianos, Salons and Larra's Pistol

    Calle de San Mateo 13, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Behind this calm 18th-century façade on Calle de San Mateo hides a whole lost world: drawing rooms with silk walls, portraits in gilded frames, fans, porcelain, a dining table set for guests who never arrive, and a piano waiting for someone to sit down.

    The museum was founded in 1924 by the Marquis of Vega-Inclán, a restless collector who also championed Spain's first state-run hotel, the parador, a few years later. His idea was to show how a well-off Madrid family lived in the Romantic era, roughly from the 1830s to the 1860s, room by room, so that you feel you have walked into their house while they stepped out.

    And in that house, music was everything. Before records and radio, the salon was the concert hall. In the evenings families and friends gathered around the piano for songs, sonatas and dances: waltzes, polkas, mazurkas. A young lady's education was incomplete without piano lessons, and a talented guest could make or ruin a reputation in one evening. In 1856 Madrid opened the Teatro de la Zarzuela, giving the city's own light opera a permanent home, and the tunes heard on stage were played the next day in salons like these.

    But Romanticism also had a dark side, and it is on display here too. Mariano José de Larra was the sharpest satirist of his age, a journalist who mocked censorship, bureaucracy and Spanish idleness with deadly wit. In 1837, at just twenty-seven, after a love affair ended, he shot himself. The museum shows a pistol that tradition identifies as the one he used.

    Romantic writers and the Movida kids had more in common than you might think: both generations came of age after years of censorship, both lived fast, and both believed art could change the way a whole city breathed. Now walk south through the streets of Chueca for a few minutes to the square that carries the name of a composer.

  8. 8. Plaza de Chueca: A Composer's Square and a Reborn Barrio

    Plaza de Chueca, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    You are in a small, crowded square of terraces and a metro entrance, with rainbow flags hanging from more than one balcony. Everyone in Madrid knows the name Chueca. Far fewer people know that it belongs to a composer.

    Federico Chueca was born in Madrid in 1846 and became the king of the género chico, the short, cheeky one-act zarzuelas that Madrid audiences adored at the end of the nineteenth century. The story goes that as a medical student he was arrested during the student riots of 1865 and passed the time in custody writing waltzes, which the composer Francisco Asenjo Barbieri later helped bring to the stage.

    His great hit was La Gran Vía, written in 1886 with Joaquín Valverde. It was a satirical revue in which the streets and squares of Madrid come to life on stage, singing and dancing, worried about a grand new avenue that was going to be cut through the old city. The joke is that the avenue existed only on paper: work on the real Gran Vía did not begin until 1910. Chueca's tunes were whistled in every street long before the bulldozers arrived.

    A century later, this square was in a sorry state. In the 1980s the old Justicia quarter was run-down, with empty shops and a serious drug problem. Then, in the 1990s, gay and lesbian Madrileños began opening bars, cafés, bookshops and businesses here, and the neighbourhood came back to life. Chueca became Spain's best-known LGBT+ barrio and a symbol of the country's transformation.

    Every summer, Madrid Pride turns these streets into one of the largest celebrations of its kind in Europe, and in 2017 the city hosted WorldPride. Federico Chueca, the man who set Madrid's streets dancing, would probably approve. Now walk a couple of minutes south-west to a square that carries the name of the man who helped change Spain's laws.

  9. 9. Plaza de Pedro Zerolo: The Square of Equal Marriage

    Plaza de Pedro Zerolo, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Find a bench in this small square of trees and terraces and look at the street sign. Not long ago it carried another name. Today it honours a man who was still alive at the start of this century, which in a city of saints and kings is quite unusual.

    To understand why, you need to remember where Spain started. Under Franco, homosexuality was persecuted by law. In 1954 it was added to an old law against vagrants and criminals, and in 1970 a new law on so-called social danger allowed gay men and women to be imprisoned or sent to special centres. Only in 1979, after the dictatorship, did homosexuality disappear from that law.

    The first Pride demonstration in Madrid marched in 1978, when it still took real courage. In the 1990s a lawyer and activist named Pedro Zerolo, born in Caracas in 1960 and raised in the Canary Islands, became one of the leading voices of the movement, and later a socialist councillor in Madrid's city hall. His cause was simple to state and hard to win: the same marriage for everyone.

    In 2005 he won it. Spain became the third country in the world, after the Netherlands and Belgium, to open marriage to same-sex couples, with full rights including adoption. A country that had imprisoned gay people within living memory now stood at the front of the line. Zerolo died of cancer in 2015, aged fifty-four, and soon afterwards the city gave his name to this square in the heart of Chueca.

    Come back during Pride week and you will not recognise it: stages go up in the squares of the barrio, and the whole neighbourhood turns into one long open-air concert, with Spanish pop anthems sung by thousands of voices at once. Now make your way north-east through the streets of Chueca to Calle de Fernando VI and the most unusual palace in Madrid.

  10. 10. Palacio de Longoria: Art Nouveau and the House of Songwriters

    Calle de Fernando VI 4, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    Stand at the corner and watch the building seem to melt: walls that ripple instead of standing straight, stone that sprouts leaves and flowers, iron balconies that twist like seaweed, and a rounded corner that refuses to be a corner at all. In a city of granite and brick, this is a shock.

    It was built at the start of the twentieth century, around 1902 to 1904, by the architect José Grases Riera for the financier Javier González Longoria. Madrid mostly preferred sober, official styles, so the Palacio de Longoria is a rare thing: the purest example of Art Nouveau, modernismo, in the capital, closer in spirit to Gaudí's Barcelona than to the palaces of the Castellana.

    Since 1950 the palace has belonged to the SGAE, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, the society that collects royalties for Spain's songwriters, composers and authors. Its origins go back to 1899, when the composer Ruperto Chapí, the man behind the zarzuela La Revoltosa, and the writer Sinesio Delgado founded a society of Spanish authors so that the people who wrote the music and the plays, and not the middlemen, would control the money their works earned.

    Think about what that means. Every time a song by a Movida band plays on the radio, in a bar in Malasaña or at a Pride concert in Chueca, a little stream of money flows back to its creators, and for decades much of that accounting has passed through this extraordinary house. Inside, a famous staircase curls upward beneath a glass skylight, as sinuous as the façade.

    There is a nice irony in it: a banker's dream palace ended up as the home of the musicians. Now follow Calle de Fernando VI east, a street named after the king you are about to meet, to the Plaza de las Salesas and its great church.

  11. 11. Salesas Reales & Santa Bárbara: The Queen and Her Harpsichord

    Calle del General Castaños 2, 28004 Madrid, Spain

    In front of you rises a grand church of stone, with a dome and a sculpted façade, and beside it a long palace that now houses Spain's Supreme Court. Both were born from the fear of one woman: a queen who did not want to grow old alone.

    Barbara of Braganza was a Portuguese princess who married the future Ferdinand the Sixth of Spain in 1729. They never had children, and Barbara knew what usually happened to a widowed queen in Spain: a convent, exile, or a quiet life at the mercy of her successor. So she built her own retreat, a royal convent for the Salesian nuns, raised between 1750 and 1757 at enormous cost. Madrileños mocked it with a famous pun on her name: barbarous queen, barbarous taste, barbarous expense.

    And yet this is the perfect place to end a walk about music. Barbara was a gifted keyboard player, and her teacher in Lisbon was Domenico Scarlatti, one of the great composers of the century. He followed her to Spain, stayed in her service for the rest of his life and wrote more than five hundred keyboard sonatas, many surely for her fingers. He died in Madrid in 1757. At the same court sang Farinelli, the most famous castrato in Europe, who had come to Spain to soothe King Philip the Fifth with the same few arias night after night, and who later staged dazzling operas for Ferdinand and Barbara.

    The irony: Barbara died in 1758, before her husband, and never lived in her retreat. Ferdinand, broken by grief, died the following year. Both lie in this church. In 1870 the nuns were gone, and the convent became the Palace of Justice. Today Spain's highest court sits where a queen once planned to listen to her music in peace.

    From the cannons of 1808 to the guitars of 1980, from Chueca's waltzes to Pride anthems and a queen's harpsichord sonatas, these streets have always been loud. Step inside the church if it is open, stand still for a moment... and listen.