This particular episode is about the history of violence in Madrid and it was inspired because one of my most popular blog posts is called Gangs of Madrid, Is Madrid a Safe City? The following is a transcript of the podcast.
Transcript
When I lived in London as a young woman, I used to go home alone late at night and I never felt very secure and that feeling has just got worse over the years. When I go back to visit my parents, I am less foolhardy than I was when I was younger. I always take a taxi home and that’s because there’s a big problem with binge drinking in the UK. I think it’s becoming less of a problem but you still see it and often when people binge drink there, things can explode into violence. You also have a problem with mugging.
I was always very conscious of this issue when I lived in London. Then I lived in Tokyo, which is probably the safest city on the planet, the safest capital city on the planet. You can leave your purse in a cafe and come back and someone will hand it in with all the money in. You can go back very late at night and not feel threatened.
There’s a slight problem with possible sex pests but that’s a side issue. I generally felt incredibly safe in Tokyo late at night and I could go home late at night without feeling threatened. That’s not to say there wasn’t an issue with public drunkenness because there very much was. The Japanese love to drink over weekend and they love to binge drink just as much as the Brits and things can get really messy. You can see vomit all over the place, salarymen, that’s the businessmen, absolutely plastered on the metro but they are well behaved and things never explode into violence. It just gets a bit silly.
When I moved to Madrid, the culture of drinking was a lot more grown up. Spanish people don’t tend to binge drink as much and you don’t get the same culture of fights on the weekend breaking out outside pubs. It used to be that you didn’t have much of a problem with mugging either so the main form of crime would be pickpocketing. I’ve had my pocket picked in Sol, this is ground central for that because it’s full of crowds and I stupidly left my wallet in my pocket and it was stolen. A Japanese friend had everything stolen when she was waiting for us on New Year’s in Sol and she was very distressed. They often take advantage of the fact that foreigners tend to be a little bit distracted, they’re excited about being on holiday in a new place. Everyone seems very friendly and nice and it does indeed feel very safe and you can leave your bag open and bam, everything’s gone.
They’re very skilled. I mentioned this in one of my posts about scams in Madrid. A common method since the late 19th century is diversionary tactics. Somebody will approach you with a clipboard and ask if you want to take part in a survey. While you’re distracted, their partner will pick your pocket. So watch out for that. Up until recently, I would have said that was the only thing you have to watch out for.
However, sadly this is no longer the case. There’s been a rise in violent muggings over the past year or so and I’ve seen this reflected in my own personal experience. I will say that it’s been located around a particular area that’s become problematic, that is the area around Lavapiés. So what you really need to do is if you find yourself around that area or indeed any area, is don’t get too drunk because being drunk makes you a target. Why is this problem suddenly on the rise? I’d say that it really has a lot to do with the fact that there’s been a lot of increasing poverty in the city and it’s a complex issue but ever since the 2008 crash. A lot of property has fallen into the hands of big developers who continue to buy up lots and lots of property in the city.
Rents have been rising a lot over the past few years. Homelessness is increasing a great deal and if you have a very poverty-stricken disenfranchised population I think you’re just going to get a lot of crime. But in comparison to how Madrid used to be, I would say that we probably had a worse problem around the 80s when I know my area in particular was notorious. There was a huge influx of drugs into Spain, there was the same problems of poverty going on and lots and lots of heroin addicts who were attacking people just trying to get cash.
So I don’t think the problem is anywhere near as bad as it was in the 80s and I think we’ve always had crime. And this is what this podcast is about. We’re going to go back and look at the history of violent crime in the city from a historical perspective. So we’ll start in the 16th century and we’ll go all the way up to the present day.
And I guess we’ll start again in Lavapiés because Lavapiés has always had its social problems. So back in 16th century Madrid, when it became the capital, Madrid was quite small, it was a small town of around 3,000 people. Its population suddenly exploded to about 30,000 people and there was a great itinerant population who were coming and going all the time. And these were soldiers because you’re talking about capital city in the middle of a vast empire, soldiers coming and going and what the soldiers like to do. They like to have sex and they like to fight and Lavapiés was where you would go to do these things.
This is because Philip II was quite a canny character. He saw that he had a little bit of a problem with prostitution and he stipulated that all the brothels be located in Lavapiés, out of sight, out of mind in the poorest area of the city. Along with brothels, you also got a lot of sword-fighting schools. Young Spanish men really, really liked to fight. Many of them had grown up with these chivalric ideals that they were keen to sort of prove themselves on the battlefield. And in Madrid, they were honing their skills. Spain was famous for a particular style of fighting. One of the hallmarks of this style was fancy footwork and faints. Another hallmark was using both a sword and dagger while fighting. So the dagger would be held in the left hand and in the right would be a ropero or rapier.
In street fights, a cloak could also be wrapped around the arm and used as a shield or to be thrown over an opponent to neatly net them. Now, sword-fighting had officially been outlawed in Spain by Ferdinand II of Aragon. But swords were so frequently drawn in the 16th and 17th century that corpses were not an uncommon sight on Madrid’s streets. Hence, the penalties for fighting in the street tended to be quite severe. And one particular famous figure who fell foul of these rules was Miguel de Cervantes. A document was found in an archive in the 19th century and it was an order for the arrest of a certain Miguel de Cervantes, accused of gravely wounding a man while dueling.
And the victim’s injuries were bad enough to merit a severe punishment. Once captured, Cervantes was not only to have his right hand amputated, he was also to be sent into exile for ten years. Now, some dispute this is the Cervantes or not, but I actually think it’s highly likely that it was him, because Cervantes didn’t stick around to wait to be punished.
In fact, he turned up in Italy quite soon after. So I think we can be fairly sure that Cervantes was the man captured for this. Don Quixote really skewers the chivalric ideas that we find prevalent in those times and it’s probably why it was such a smash hit at the time. And I think the chivalric ideals were something that Cervantes himself held when he was a young man and got into hot water over. Cervantes wasn’t the only literary figure to be involved in duelling. Quevedo even got away with murder in 1611. After witnessing a man slap a woman on the cheek in the church of San Martin, he rushed out of the brute and ran him through with a sword on the street, mortally wounding him.
And like with Cervantes, the punishment would have been exile for sword fighting. He could even been sent to work as a galley slave or been put to death. The thing about Quevedo, however, is that, unlike Cervantes, he was proper nobility. Cervantes was Hidalgo, which is a kind of second-rate nobility. But Quevedo, the poet, was a well-connected aristocrat and he could pretty much do his be pleased. So he sort of got off scot-free after absenting himself from Madrid for a little while. As you can see, violence in Madrid pretty much erupted all over the place.
Like I said, Lavapiés was a particular hotbed for it. And there was a fencing school set up famously on the Calle de Espada, espada means sword. The master hung up a sword there which was rumoured to have been the property of a French nobleman and it was hung up outside the premises. The street was named after this very sword as was Calle de la Esgrima, esgrima means fencing which is the second place this master set up shop after getting booted out for non-payment of rent. This didn’t matter it was one of the most popular fencing schools in the city. I don’t know why the master didn’t pay his rent but he seemed to be doing pretty well because people were always turning up at his school and they wanted to try their hand against his pupils who were famous for winning their fights.
This led to so many street brawls that the master was ordered by the authorities to conduct his classes indoors. I mentioned earlier that cloak was a useful device in a street brawl. It could be used as a shield wrapped around your arm. It could also be used as a way to hide a weapon. And criminals in 18th century Madrid really used to profit from this fact. The cloaks worn by a working-class man were long and voluminous and the wide-brimmed hat served the same function as a hoodie. It hid the identity of the perpetrator. By the mid 1700s the king’s Neapolitan advisor the Marquis de Esquilache decided that these long cloaks and wide-brimmed hats had to go because there was a huge problem with public order in the city.
People were being mugged all the time. So the marquis issued a proclamation stating that people must wear the short capes and three-cornered hats a la Française. Now all the suck ups in Charles III’s court we’re talking Charles III who of course was a Bourbon king who was part of this new French monarchy that took over in 1700. All of the people in the court capitulated but things went more than a little awry when it came to commoners, sorry, adopting the nambi-pambi foreign style of dress. To add salt to the wound this edict from Esquilache came hot on the heels of another proclamation that he’d given to liberalise the grain trade and this meant that the price of bread and other staple foods shot through the roof. So this man is now telling people how to dress after his governance has made people a great deal poorer.
So it didn’t go down terribly well. On March the 10th 1766 placards went up throughout the city instructing people to adopt the new style of dress or have their hats and clothes confiscated. These were torn right back down and the cry of long-lived Spain and death to Esquilache went up and everything came to a head in the tiny square of Anton Martin.
Anton Martin of course just on the edge of Lavapies. So in the Plaza Anton Martin, a couple of lads wearing long cloaks and wide-brimmed hats swaggered up to some soldiers. Insults were traded and swords were drawn. And it looked as if the crown might win this particular skirmish until one of the capped crusaders whistled loudly and a band of armed and angry citizens appeared to back them up.
Soldiers led the scene of course and mob pursued them all the way to the palace where upon their demands were presented to the king. One of these of course was the immediate expulsion of Esquilache, difficult to say, expulsion of Esquilache and the repeal of the edit. Esquilache holed up in the house of the Seven Chimneys which is a historic house in the centre of Madrid down by Paseo del Prado. The king went even further fearing for his life he escaped to Aranjuez for quite a while which is a palace outside the centre of Madrid and then capitulated. Esquilache was sent away in shame and the monarch returned the drama died down but he got his way using less draconian methods. He was quite a canny chap, Charles III.
The long cape was now declared to be the uniform of the executioner and the city’s citizens did not really want to have anything to do with this ill-famed character as so they began to ditch their long cloaks in favour of shorter ones. Charles III did quite a good deal to improve safety of the city itself in other ways. He’s the man responsible for introducing the Sereno or the Night Watchman to the city. The Night Watchman would patrol the dark streets during winter and call out the weather conditions on the hour and he also got them to do double duty as lamprock lighters. Before that citizens were responsible for lighting the streets themselves and they would have liked to do so because a dark street was dangerous especially if you had a man in a long cloak and wide brim. His cuerpo de serenos was officially formed in 1774 and they patrolled the streets nightly.
It was a great relief for the populace who were justifiably afraid of being mugged and these serenos were quite popular with normal people because they were a good sight to see when you were heading back late at night. They wore a peaked cap and a blue cloak and they held a chuzo, which was a kind of stick with an iron spike on the end. Many of them hail from Asturias just like many of the city’s water carriers and the office was passed down from father to son. The job requirements stipulated that they needed to be over four feet tall, physically fit with a clear voice and they were on hand to help with emergencies working from dust till dawn which was a very difficult job. Their pay was pretty paltry so on their days off they had to go and beg arms from neighborhood residents.
Besides lamp lighting and calling out the weather guarding the streets they also started to hold the front door keys of apartment buildings and in those days once the porter locked up for the night you needed to call the sereno to open the front door for you if you’d stayed out late partying so if you arrived home you would clap your hands and call for the sereno to open the door. Now it sounds like this is all distant history but actually the serenos existed until 1978 and they were ostensibly only phased out because of the introduction of the intercom which allowed people to control entry to their own home doors but it’s a bit suspicious because by this time electric lighting and a proper police force have been introduced so why couldn’t people be trusted to handle their own front door keys?
This probably is because they were a means of social control. Many were informants of the secret police. I’ve also heard that many of them were ex-military which probably meant that they were loyal to the regime. In any case, they disappeared after the end of the dictatorship and as I said Madrid was not particularly safe at that point because suddenly the country started to be flooded with drugs there was a lot of poverty going on at the same time as it being a wonderful liberating time with famously the Movida movement started up during the 80s there was also this shadowy side of it of the drugs.
If you watch the Almodovar film Atame, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! you’ll see a scene in which Antonio Banderos goes to a square in Chueca and that Chueca square looks very different to how it looks now. Now it’s clean and modern but in this film it shows the reality of how it was in the 80s in which drug deals are being done it’s very sketchy late at night and you better watch out.
This was also a period in which gang violence was a huge problem and in my area of Usera there was a very very famous gang called the Ojos Negros. Gangs were a particular problem in outlying districts such as Carabanchel, Vallecas and Usera as they are to this day we’ve seen a resurgence of gang violence again no coincidence these are some of the most deprived areas of the city.Usera and Vallecas for instance in the 70s began life as shanty towns the devastation following the civil war forced many to move from rural areas to cities housing estates eventually went up in the 50s and 60s but people’s livelihoods were quite precarious there weren’t many jobs available as today indeed unemployment’s pretty high and young men in deprived suburbs started to form gangs this is around the time that West Side Story hits the cinemas so many of them identified with the rockers on the screen and they sported slicked bat hair black jeans and leather jackets one of the most fearsome of these gangs was the Ojos Negros the black eyes as I mentioned before and they were named after their leader’s terrifying dead stare.
He was said to have looked like an Indian and his nickname was Cherokee but his real name was Angel Luis. Angel even got parts in as an extra in westerns due to his disresemblance the gang mainly made them money robbing chemists or billiard halls stealing cars snatching purses or demanding protection money from local discos. Turf wars broke out between rival gangs such as the Vikings and the Pepsi-colas many of them carried chains knives and razor blades in case of a rumble. Again you see the American influence coming through. Because some of them were originally formed in New York we have the DDP the Dominicans Don’t Play and the Trinitarios and they generally have turf wars where the weapon of choice tends to be the machete.
My husband’s seen the machete fight in the street outside our house and I heard someone telling me recently that their brother in law witnessed a machete fight in Vallecas. That brings us back to the central question: is Madrid safe? I’m gonna say yes um if you’re not walking around drunk if you’re not a member of a gang you’re generally fairly safe on your own you just have to have a little bit of street smarts around you.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Madrid and you’re visiting or you live in the city you might want to put me in for one of my guided tours I love telling people about the history of the city it’s my big passion so do get in touch you can email me at [email protected].
