Madrid, Spain: Where the World Came to Celebrate

The World Traveller Series — Entry No. 3

by Brett Hayhoe

There are cities you visit, and then there are cities that visit you — that get under your skin, into your blood, and stay there long after the plane has lifted off. Madrid is the second kind. I knew it the moment I stepped out of the taxi into the warm June air of Chueca, the city’s legendary LGBTQ+ neighbourhood, and heard the music before I’d even found my hotel. It was June 2017, and Madrid wasn’t just hosting a Pride festival. It was hosting the world.

WorldPride 2017 drew an extraordinary 3.5 million people to a city whose population sits around 3.2 million. Read that again. More people arrived to celebrate than actually live there. The boys I was travelling with told me the regular annual Madrid Pride — already one of the biggest on the planet — pulls over a million. This was three times that. The streets didn’t feel full. They felt alive, in the way that only happens when joy is the organising principle of an entire city, and everyone has arrived with the same intention.

I was not entirely prepared for any of it.

THE CITY BEFORE THE CROWD

Madrid rewards you for arriving early — before the parades, before the stages fill and the music floods the plazas. In the mornings, when the rest of the world was sleeping off the night before, I walked. Down the grand sweep of the Paseo del Prado, past the Prado Museum with its Velázquez and its Goyas, past the Reina Sofía where Picasso’s Guernica hangs in a room that demands silence even when the rest of the city is screaming with colour.

Old Madrid sits on hills and speaks in stone. The Plaza Mayor — 400 years old that very year — was hung with rainbow banners and a message in English and Spanish that became the city’s unofficial anthem for the week: Whoever you love, Madrid loves you. I stopped and read it twice. There’s something remarkable about a city of that age choosing to say something that progressive, that plainly. It felt earned.

The Habsburg architecture, the tiled bars serving vermut at noon, the old men playing chess in the shade of the Retiro park while, fifty metres away, someone danced past in full feather and sequin — Madrid contains multitudes, and it does so without apology or awkwardness. That, I think, is its great gift.

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD THAT REINVENTED ITSELF

Chueca is the beating heart of Madrid’s LGBTQ+ identity, but it wasn’t always. In the late 1970s it was a neighbourhood best known for being the city’s most convenient place to buy drugs — cheap real estate, avoided by everyone with options. Gay entrepreneurs saw the opportunity and took it, bar by bar, café by café, transforming it over two decades into one of the most celebrated urban neighbourhoods in Europe.

By WorldPride 2017, Chueca was euphoric. Every balcony draped in colour, every café spilling onto the footpath, every corner a gathering point. People had come from every country on earth. I heard Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Arabic — all blurring together in that particular harmonic that cities only achieve when they are truly, completely open. I bought a cold caña from a bar I couldn’t find again if I tried, and I sat on the steps of the Plaza de Chueca and felt, for a moment, like the world had briefly sorted itself out.

THE CONFERENCE — AND THE MOMENT

Part of my reason for being in Madrid was professional. I was attending a major media conference as part of the WorldPride program — a serious, formal affair with the President of the Community of Madrid, senior city dignitaries, tourism officials, and international press. The kind of room where you check your jacket twice and sit up straight.

My travel companions — fluent Spanish speakers, all of them — moved through the pre-conference receptions with ease, laughing at jokes I couldn’t quite track, charming officials in perfectly conjugated sentences. I smiled a lot. I nodded. I made the internationally recognised face of someone who is following along when they are absolutely not following along.

When it came time for me to speak — in English, which was both a relief and a mild humiliation — I said what I had to say about travel, about media, about the extraordinary significance of this event for global tourism. The room was polite. Attentive. Then I reached the end of my prepared remarks, and something happened that I cannot entirely explain.

Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the music that seemed to seep through the walls of every building in that city. Perhaps it was simply that three days in Madrid does something to your inhibitions that no therapist could replicate.

I looked out at the room — the president, the dignitaries, the cameras — and I said:

“Viva España. Viva Madrid. Viva la vida.”

The room erupted. I mean erupted — the kind of laughter and applause that fills a room from the floor up. The president was clapping. Officials who had been admirably stone-faced throughout the preceding three hours were grinning. My travel companions, sitting near the back, looked at each other with the particular expression of people witnessing something they didn’t see coming.

I hadn’t planned it. I don’t know where it came from. But in that moment, in that city, in that week — it was exactly right.

WHAT MADRID TEACHES YOU

Every city has something it’s trying to tell you, if you’re willing to listen. Madrid’s message in that extraordinary week in 2017 was this: joy is not frivolous. Celebration is not an afterthought. A city that chooses to welcome three and a half million visitors with the words whoever you love, Madrid loves you is making a philosophical statement about what public life can be.

I’ve been to many cities since. I carry Madrid with me in a particular way — not just the architecture, not just the food (though the food deserves its own entry entirely), but the feeling of walking through streets where the dominant emotion was something close to gratitude. Gratitude for being alive, for being there, for being whoever you happened to be.

That’s a rare thing. I went there not speaking the language. I left having accidentally delivered one of the better closing lines of my career.

Viva la vida indeed.

The World Traveller Series is published in Q Magazine. Entry No. 1 and Entry No. 2 are available now.