Sunday in Madrid, and the terrace cafes host throngs of ‘Domingueros’, the Sunday People. Saturday night is for ‘La Marcha’, as the Spanish call it. Thrill to the sight of packed buses and metro platforms at 2 a.m. This is the nightlife of the young and old, but only the most robust party-makers will last til the end, and in the wee hours, have their churros y chocolate. This prevents ‘resaca’, a hangover. It’s powerful medicine besides being nectar of the gods. Spanish hot chocolate is thick and made with water instead of milk. The churro that goes with it is unsweetened usually and crunchy.
Then you go home and sleep for a few hours and are back in the street in the late Sunday morning for the weekly jaunt in El Rastro. This, people do rain or shine. It’s one of the oldest districts, where more of the buildings are from the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.
The names of the streets in Madrid tell tales, like la Calle del Desengaño, which you could translate as the street of the rude awakening, and Calle de la Cabeza, the street of the head. Let me digress for a moment to tell you the story.
Originally, this neighborhood was where the meat butchering was done. Legend has it that a man who wanted to eat lamb’s head went to El Rastro and purchased the head to bring to his favorite restaurant. (You could do that then.) He was holding the lamb’s head under his cloak and was unwittingly trailing blood behind him. When the ‘aguacil’ or nightwatchman saw this he stopped the man and asked him to show him what he was carrying. The man produced the lamb’s head, but what he saw was the head of a priest who he and robbed and decapitated years before. Guilty conscience! He confessed to the murder and was summarily tried and hung. To commemorate the event of his capture, King Felipe ordered the name of the street to be changed to Calle de la Cabeza, and it’s still called that today.
On Sunday, every shop and bar in El Rastro is open, and the streets are closed to traffic. There is music in the streets, food like fried sardines and caracoles (snails) in broth, and there are waves of domingueros. The talk is loud and the vermouth and beer are cheap. Everyone is hanging out and life is good, even when it’s anything but.
It’s where you go to hear concerts in bars so small, the patrons and dancers spill out into the street with their drinks and laughter, where you stroll arm in arm with your lover from the night before in your last night’s clothes. It’s where the half mad poet who threw away his lithium is raving on the corner, and where an old woman dressed in the costume of two centuries ago is cranking a painted barrel organ. She smiles as you pass by, and an old key maker pushes his wooden canopied cart festooned with every species and size of keys imaginable, including some enormous skeleton keys.
Sunday is the result of the entire week’s progress. It’s the promise of a new dress or an ‘occación’ (unexpected special offer), like a mint condition 45 rpm of Mavis Staples’ “I’ll Take You There”, right in between Camaron de la Isla and Rafael. You wonder how the hell it made the long voyage to this vintage record seller’s stock. There are hundreds of stalls selling a dizzying plethora of new and used stuff. You want a piano? A drill? A leather jacket? Baby clothes? Hiking boots? There are even streets where you’ll find crazy stuff no one would ever want to buy, and a lot that’s probably stolen.
At three o’clock, the sound of the galvanized metal poles falling onto the pavement echoes in the Plaza de Cascorro as the vendors break down their stalls. It’s time to go have lunch, either at your friend’s grandma’s house if you are not Madrileñan (La abuelita or La Yaya) or your favorite restaurant.
The defining authorities of Spain's collective past—the Church and the military—don't have the same psychological power over people as they once did, and so this kind of Sunday event is emphatically secular, but its observance is a ritual bordering on the religious.
I leave you with a video of street musicians, a thing you can see any day of the week in downtown Madrid. Here, playing Astor Piazzola.
Phone video kindly lent to me by my friend, Marlon. It’s from this morning. ;)
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Isn’t Spanish night life wonderful? I loved the story of Calle de la Cabeza. I live part time near Girona and love it!
Barna IS only a few hours from Girona...😂