kellycrull.com - expat life in Spain

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A guy living in Barcelona emailed me recently and asked for advice on where to rent an apartment (or a piso) in Madrid. I remember three years ago when April and I first moved to Spain and were walking the streets of Madrid looking for an apartment. We were hopeless—we could barely tell what was up and down on the metro map, let alone which neighborhoods would be a good fit for us. Thankfully our friends Jesús and Rachel gave us some good advice.

So, it’s time to return the favor. Above, you’ll see I’ve sketched out a map of the Madrid city center with all the neighborhoods in different colors. Below, I’ve scribbled down a few thoughts about each neighborhood.

Of course, which neighborhoods are more livable than others is always a matter of debate. So for those who live in Madrid, let the friendly bantering begin. Hopefully through some discussion we can come up with a pretty good guide for anyone looking for a place to live in Madrid.

Sol / Opera / Las Cortes
Sol is the city center. Most city dwellers spend a lot of time here shopping, meeting friends, or just passing through from one place to another. Because Sol is central and home to some of the best monuments in the city such as Plaza Mayor, The Royal Palace, and The Cathedral of Almudena, it’s full of tourists (and as a result, pickpockets). Sol may be a great place to visit or spend time, but it’s not great for daily life sorts of things like buying groceries or getting a haircut.

Gran Vía
Take a walk down Gran Vía, and you’ll know you are in a big city. Tall office buildings, giant department stores, movie theaters—this is modern Madrid. Beware of Plaza Luna. It’s rundown and dirty, and like Gran Vía and c/Montera by night, it’s where the prostitutes work.

Huertas
Not a neighborhood known for anything in particular, Huertas is still home of some of my Madrid favorites. Populart is my favorite jazz club. Ricci is my favorite gelado / ice cream shop. And Plaza de Santa Ana is a great place to enjoy a summer drink on a terrace. Huertas is also walking distance from Sol, Madrid’s best museums, and the ever popular Retiro Park.

La Latina
Everything that is traditionally Madrid you’ll find here—the people, the food, the architecture, and the way of life. La Latina is hands down the oldest and most beautiful neighborhood in Madrid. Still, old buildings are nicer to look at than to live in. They’re often rundown, dingy, dark and lacking modern conveniences like heat, good-sized windows, natural gas, etc.

El Rastro
El Rastro may look like other neighborhoods in Madrid during the week, but on Sunday it’s something else altogether. Street venders line the streets and people flood in from everywhere to get a bargain and spend an afternoon with friends eating lunch on a terrace. Pickpockets are rampant. If you live in this neighborhood, think twice about sleeping in on Sundays or doing anything other than watching the swarms of people from your windows.

Lavapiés
Lavapiés is a neighborhood of extremes. Here you’ll find young and old, Madrileño and foreigner, and the barrio with a reputation for being full of life and full of crime. I would consider not living here for safety reasons.

Atocha
Named after the city’s most important train station, Atocha is great for getting anywhere by train. Also, its central location puts most places nearby. Atocha may not be the coolest place to live, but it’s convenient and good for daily life sorts of things.

Malasaña
Malasaña is quiet and residential, but also trendy and alternative. See the Conde Duque cultural center or the shops and people on c/Fuencarral or find out for yourself by spending a night in any one of the small and eclectic clubs in the area. Malasaña is also international. Some of the best international restaurants are on c/San Bernardino. Just down the street is the international food market.

Chueca
Chueca is best known for being the gay district of Madrid. It’s yuppie, cosmopolitan, and prides itself for having a great nightlife. By day, Chueca is the city on a small scale, a blend of little streets, little shops, and the hustle and bustle of normal life.

Alonso Martínez / Bilbao
Most of the people who live in this neighborhood are young professionals, but on the weekends the streets surge with teenagers clubbing and drinking and smoking in the streets. The location is close to Sol, but also to the business district along the Castellana.

Moncloa / Argüelles
Madrid’s Complutense, the largest university in Spain, is located in Moncloa. Mostly students and the elderly live here. The neighborhood is a getaway from the chaos of the city center, but only a short metro ride away. You’ll find everything you need for daily life here. Also, the park around El Templo de Debod and Parque del Oeste provide some quality green space for hanging out with friends.

Castellana
The Castellana is Madrid’s business world. Here you’ll find the headquarters of many banks and companies. There’s not much to look at besides wide highways and tall buildings. It’s a place to live if you want to be close to work.

Salamanca
Salamanca is a classy neighborhood. A lot of people who have money and want to live in the city live here. Sunday afternoons at Retiro Park is a favorite pastime for the locals. Try it for yourself sometime, and you’ll find there’s something to do for everybody.

Nuevos Ministerios / Rios Rosas / Chamartín
These neighborhoods are mostly residential and lots of families live here. They are far enough outside the city that most people probably only go the city center if they work there or on special occasions. Shopping caters to the locals, including some fine tapas restaurants—nothing fancy, just good food at great prices.

General Guidelines:
1. The metro is very efficient in Madrid. You can get almost anywhere in the city very quickly and comfortably (although rush hour can be a different story).

2. In terms of safety, as an assumption, anything South of Sol is less safe. The farther South you go, the dodgier it gets.

3. If being central is important to you, I would stay within the map I’ve drawn, maybe even excluding Nuevos Ministerios / Rios Rosas / Chamartín, which is a bit far away. Personally, I’d also prefer to live outside of the Sol area because it’s mostly for tourists and doesn’t provide very much in terms of grocery stories and that sort of thing to people who actually want to live there. Neighborhoods like La Latina, Malasaña, Chueca, Alonso Martínez, and Salamanca, for example, are both central and very livable.

4. Green space. If you want green space, obviously living somewhere near Retiro would be a plus. However, there is also a long and narrow park west of Argüelles running from the Royal Palace to Moncloa (roughly) called Parque del Oeste as well as a giant area called Casa de Campo straight west of the city where you go for a run, mountain bike, or sit for an afternoon around the lake there. Some people think Casa de Campo is a little barren, though, so I’d check it out for yourself.

5. Trains. If you are working out of the city or need to go to the suburbs regularly (for example, to teach English), it’s actually better to live either East or West of the center of the city (Sol) because there is no train station in the center. The most central train stations are Atocha at the Atocha train station, Recoletos, which is on c/Recoletos between Chueca and Salamanca, Nuevos Ministerios, and Príncipe Pío, which is about a 10 min. walk from the Royal Palace in Argüelles.

Special thanks to softdoc.es for help with the map.

Our first night in Castellón April and I found ourselves by accident walking down the beach just as the moon climbed out of the water in full bloom. It was beautiful, romantic, and mystical. The moon lifted lazily into the sky like a helium balloon, and the realization sunk deeper inside of us that this place we were calling our new home was still odd and unfamiliar. Shadowy figures stood along the beach with flashlights behind lines of fishing poles anchored in the sand. The tops of the poles glowed like Christmas lights, which we could only guess indicated when there was a catch. Who were these people? What were they fishing for? Was the tide bringing the fish to shallow waters? These men were fishing for something, and so were we.

April and I don’t look Spanish. No olive complexion. No brown hair. No brown eyes. No mullet.

Yesterday we went to the supermarket to get some food to stock our mini fridge at the hotel. As we were waiting at the meat counter to buy some cheese, an older lady walked up and asked the woman behind the counter if she needed a ticket to mark her place in line since April and I were standing at the counter, but we didn’t have a ticket. I took a look around, and sure enough, there at the end of the counter was a ticket machine with a red ticket waiting for us. I’d never seen a meat counter with a ticket machine before.

The woman behind the counter said, “The immigrants don’t have a ticket, but I’ll help them first.” She pointed at the two of us.

April looked at me and said, “Did she just call us immigrants?”

April and I checked into our hotel yesterday, and in the afternoon met two students from the Masters program, Leah and Tim, as well as Tim’s three room mates.

Today as we were waiting in line to get on the bus to the beach, I noticed someone on the bus waving to me through the glass window. It was Colin, one of Tim’s roommates who we had met the day before.

It’s been two days, and we’re already running into people we know on the street.

The problem with small towns is they always want to be bigger. Even big cities usually have a big brother they look up to. Of course they’d never tell you that, but that’s the way brothers are. I get the impression here in Spain that it’s like this: Barcelona wants to be as big as Madrid, Valencia wants to be as big as Barcelona, Castellón wants to be as big as Valencia, and so on. Just like people, cities are never content with who they are.

Castellón may be the capital of its province, and it weighs in as the largest city in the province with over 160,000 residents, but the fact is, it’s still small. Nevertheless, I’d like to stick up for the little guy. I don’t know my new home very well yet, but I can tell you this: April and I went hunting for Se Aquila (“for rent”) signs today and as far as we wandered in any direction, we were never more than a ten minute walk from our hotel. I think life will be very manageable here. Everybody and everything a person could need is close by.

After over a year of planning and waiting from Madrid, my wife April and I have finally arrived at our new home, Castellón de la Plana, where April will be doing a Masters degree in Peace and Development. We’ve been at a hotel for two days, haven’t even begun to start looking for an apartment yet, but here’s my first impressions of our little town on the Mediterranean:

Our guest contributor is Mark Edwards, chair of the Sociology Department at Oregon State University. But more than being just a stodgy professor, he’s also a good friend of mine. He’s thoughtful, and considering sociologists are about as rare as Vancouver Island Marmots, he offers us his unique perspective on one of Madrid’s oldest neighborhoods, Lavapiés.

I just finished reading Camilo José Cela’s novel La Colmena (“The Beehive”) which describes the misery and futility of dozens of people’s lives in post-civil war Madrid. The unique thing about his book is the dizzying collection of vignettes that illustrate the interconnectedness of people’s lives. La Comena has no real plot, just as the life of a beehive has no plot – it just lives. And this human hive lives because everyone goes about his or her daily activities in spite of suffering and in hopes of something changing. OK, it’s a really depressing book, but as a sociologist I was fascinated by the emphasis on how a small part of a city is woven together by people’s day-to-day affairs. And it was with this image of a beehive in my head that I took my family for a walk through one of Madrid’s more notorious neighborhoods.

We wandered through Lavapiés, a commercial district of Madrid that has been the receiving ground for tens of thousands of immigrants during the past decade. Immigrants from all over the world have descended upon this city, concentrating in many different barrios and suburbs, but Lavapiés is the oldest neighborhood to be impacted by the newer processes of globalization. A saunter through this neighborhood, even by a pasty white wide-eyed family of four Americans, gives a taste of Madrid that is worthwhile and free.

Descending south from the shopping madness of Plaza Mayor, you begin to see a preponderance of clothing, cloth, bead, and cheap jewelry stores, penetrated by an occasional mom-n-pop grocery (alimentación) or tavern (cervezería). Surprisingly, most of the stores are not selling things to tourists or even to local residents. Most display a sign saying, “ Venta al Mayor,” a phrase that for the longest time I thought meant “we sell to everyone” or “we sell to old people” or “we sell big sizes.” But it turns out that this means “we sell in bulk to people who sell this stuff elsewhere.” Indeed, when my kids tried to pick one t-shirt or one bracelet out of the bulk piles, they were scolded by the (usually) Chinese owners. And the more I looked at the things for sale, the more I realized that what I was seeing looked just like the stuff for sale in other gift shops around town. Aha! The turf of the Chinese middle-man that I studied about in my sociology classes – importing things inexpensively from abroad, selling them to local venders, and creating a solid middle class among otherwise poor immigrants.

Once we realized we could not buy anything, we focused more on just seeing what was in the neighborhood. (There’s a lesson in that I suppose.) Above these store fronts on narrow streets you can look up and see five floors of pisos with tiny balconies tilting toward each other over the street, an occasional diapered black bottom leaning against the wrought iron rail, an olive-faced young woman with kerchiefed head peeking from behind old curtains, and laundry drying everywhere. While descending from the Tirso de Molina metro stop in the direction of the Lavapiés metro stop, the streets are busy but not congested, although I discovered later that on Monday mornings the streets are completely plugged up with delivery trucks. But in the afternoon, storeowners linger at the door for a smoke, with apparently little else to do but cast suspicious gazes on people passing by. A white American family with two elementary-aged girls is a bit of an oddity in this place, and we got some stares too, but no one seemed too interested in us, perhaps because they had nothing to sell us and because we refrained from snapping photos of anyone. I suspect the men huddled on the corner, exchanging handshakes and small packages within handshakes, may well have shown some fear if we had taken pictures.

Unlike my neighborhood near the palace, there were very few people walking dogs, and as a result, the streets were refreshingly free of excremento canino (let the reader understand). We could walk without one lizard eye constantly scanning the ground for things to avoid and the other looking ahead for knee-cracking posts in the sidewalk. In the absence of canine smells lingered other smells – a whiff of sewer in the June heat, a current of cigarettes and sweat, an eddy of curry or fish frying. At the bottom of the hill, we turned left toward the Plaza Lavapiés, an amazing crossroads of humanity with people still sporting native dress from Africa, Moroccan men sitting on the backs of benches, smoking together and glowering at others, women scarved and in a hurry pulling the kids along home, and signs over restaurants indicating food from Arabia, India, Pakistan, Korea, and the Maghreb (NW Africa). The little old Spanish ladies hobbling around the sidewalk just outside their door, looking tired and mad, must have a story to tell about how their neighborhood has radically changed during their jubilado (retired, but who knows how “jubilant” they really are) years, and perhaps about how their kids don’t visit them enough, or about how their kids are trying to move them out to live with them in the suburbs but they don’t want to leave the piso where their husband died or the neighborhood they still regard as home.

Our trip through Lavapiés was not purely a walkabout, but rather we had a goal to find a North African restaurant listed in an expatriates’ newspaper as a “cheap eats.” Of course we timed it badly, as we usually do in Madrid, a couple hours after lunch had closed and a couple hours before the evening opening (which is in fact the time Americans like myself usually eat.) But our walk helped remove some of the mystery and fear of this neighborhood, one clearly discounted and warned against when tourists are instructed about safe travel in Madrid. (This is the neighborhood where some members of the accused Al-Queda cell lived while planning the March 11 train bombings and where gypsies supposedly plan how to steal your wallet.) Our kids are old enough to have felt a little bit uncomfortable, knowing they did not fit in to this place where in fact everyone fits in. I have heard about one practice of fitting in lots of people here, described by fellow urban sociologists as camas calientes (hot beds) — not some sexual practice, but rather crowding like submarine sailors endure – rotating inhabitants of a bed, where one guy gets it for 8 hours, the second guy another 8, and the third guy gets one more shift.

A great irony of Lavapiés is its name. One might think that lava pies (wash feet) is a piece of sanitary advice for those who have dared to wander these streets. But in Catholic Spain, this name must have been inspired by Jesus’ bold act of washing his disciples’ feet. In doing this, he challenged people who anticipated becoming influential leaders to have humble attitudes of service toward all. The people who live here, if they are fortunate to find work, spend their time washing other people’s feet, dishes, laundry, sidewalks, cars, houses, etc. But they return each night to a neighborhood named for the prophetic demand for the church to wash their feet. I do not know the degree to which the church serves there, but I know that to public administrators and social workers, this neighborhood looks like a confusing hive of human need with problems more complex than dirty feet.

There are lots of great places to walk in Madrid to learn about Spain’s history, but this neighborhood tells one of the big stories of contemporary Spain—a prosperous post-Christian European country dealing with a massive influx of people from all over the world, crammed into a tiny place in the city center, cutting the lawns of suburban professionals, selling pirated DVD’s in Puerta del Sol, looking for work caring for old ladies stuck in the city, and putting up with curious tourists who can get on the plane and go home once they have collected their story to tell back home.

Some friends of mine, Ryan and Gabriela Opaz, posted this photo on their website a few days ago, and I had to have it. I read the post that went with the photo and found out this sculpture is actually in Madrid.

The sculpture, a collaborative work by Andrés Casillas and Margarita García of Mexico, is part of a collection of open-air sculptures from the 20th century at Parque Juan Carlos I near the airport. The park is one of the largest in Europe, home of IFEMA’s international and national fairgrounds, and an all-around great place to go for a relaxing afternoon in the sun. People come to walk, ride their bikes, fly kites, even fish. A water show with music draws a crowd to the auditorium on summer evenings (June to September, Thursday through Sunday, at 22.30).

Hours: (June to September): Everyday from 7.00 to 24.00
(October to May): Everyday from 7.00 to 22.00
Address: Glorieta de Don Juan de Borbón s/n
Metro: Campo de las Naciones (Line
Buses: 122, 112, 104
Tel: 91 721 00 78
Admission: Free

A group of friends from the popular online Madrid message board spaintalk.multimadrid.org get together Sundays from 4:30 to 7:00 in Retiro Park to play volleyball. People of all skill levels are welcome to join and play or just have fun socializing on the sidelines. As a rough schedule, the group plays from May until August (or until it gets too hot out), and then a few months in the autumn after it cools down and before it gets cold and rainy.

Here is a map to help you find the court, and below is a summary of written directions (as posted on September 5th, 2004 on the spaintalk.multimadrid.org message board).

1. Take the metro to Atocha
2. Walk up Calle de Claudio Moyano (aka La Cuesta de Moyano), and enter the park through the Puerta del Angel Caído.
3. Walk straight up Paseo del Duque de Fernán Nuñez about 60 m. / 200 ft., and before you reach the Glorieta del Angel Caído, you will see the group playing volleyball on your right hand side. Can’t miss it,

For those who enter Retiro Park from the Main Entrance at La Puerta de Alcalá.
1. Walk up Paseo de México towards the main lake (estanque in Spanish).
2. Walk along the lake on Salón de Estanque.
3. Continue following Salón de Estanque, which turns into Avenida de Cuba until you reach the statue of the fallen angel (ángel caído).
4. At the statue, take a right and walk about 60 m. / 200 ft. down Paseo de Duque de Fernán Nuñez. The group playing volleyball will be on your left. Can’t miss it.

For the most up-to-date information about Volleyball Sundays in Retiro Park, visit the spaintalk.multimadrid.org message board and do a search for “volleyball.” Otherwise, give Jeremy (656 266 844) or Rocco (669 804 530) a call.

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kelly@caimail.net.