Decoding middle-class protest against low-cost nocturnal tourism in Madrid

ABSTRACT

Nightlife scenes in central Madrid have been profoundly affected due to the expansion of tourist-oriented night-time leisure activities during the last three decades. This paper examines a range of tensions that have recently appeared in the La Latina neighbourhood due to the conflictual coexistence between the slow and locally-oriented everyday practices remaining in this territoir and the rapid colonisation of this central quarter of Madrid by neoliberal economies of the ‘Tourist City’. Particularly, we focus on some long-term, middle-class residents who reproduce exclusionary narratives against the rapid expansion of low cost tourist-oriented nightlife, while advocating a civilised and distinctive tourism. We argue this may be seen as a renaissance of a sanitised ‘middle-class culture’ created by the fascist regime in the second half of the twentieth century. Recent middle-class’ protests in Spain’s largest cities hide a new struggle about ‘who is legitimised’ and ‘who not’ to reclaim the re-appropriation of the city centre.

KEYWORDS:

• Nightlife
• low-cost tourism
• protest
• middle classes
• Madrid
• South Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Begoña Aramayona http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4687-8500

Rubén García-Sánchez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0472-5717

Notes

1 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3622179/ryanair-hen-party-alicante-flight/.

2 We appreciate this comment made by one of the reviewers of a previous draft of this work.

3 https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/03/06/madrid/1488834215_666182.html.

4 In 2012, the design of the ‘Spain brand’ emphasised the importance of enhancing the nightlife economy as a distinctive element of Spanish tourism marketing. Others, such as the image of the popular ‘Osborne’ cognac and its famous ‘bull’, have been appropriated as patriotic symbols since the 50s and 60s until today.

5 Several Plans for urban renovation, particularly of public spaces and residential housing, were developed in this area during 1994–2003 and 2008–2011, cementing the neighbourhood as a middle-class, marginal-free area (Aramayona, García-Sánchez, Martín, Martínez, & Corraliza, 2019)

6 The constant allusion to the exclusively ‘historical’ character of the neighbourhood, with special emphasis on its monarchical, noble and imperial past (‘Madrid, the village of the House of Austria’, ‘the ancient and noble area of Madrid’) renders other residential population profiles invisible and fails to recognise the variety of people who, de facto, inhabit the area although without being residents or home-owners: although marginal, low-income people still live there (with differences in household income of up to 25,000 euros per year). The ‘noble district’ narrative also renders invisible other events that could form part of the historical narrative of the place, such as the anti-fascist political struggles during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) or the clandestine left-wing struggles during Franco’s regime, especially strong during the Autarchy period (1939–1959), as well as other marginal practices such as the high presence of elderly women working as prostitutes on its streets during the fifties and sixties or the emergence of gay venues popularly known for allowing practices such as urinating or nudity until the nineties.