He observes him, behind an almost opaque glass, with a sick eye, and, before the door to the portal closes, Juan Antonio knows that this will not be a neighbor either. “Do you see why I tell you that I don't like my street? This Frenchman, for example, who is he?” he asks. «Where will he go? To the lawyer? To the psychologist? To the brothel on the top floor or to take a nap at the Airbnb?» he says. The 78-year-old man expresses himself in the darkness of the entrance hall to his block, on the odd-numbered sidewalk on Gran Vía Street, near the end of Plaza España. Together with his wife, Valeria Sánchez, the same age, Juan Antonio takes roll call of the string of tourists who enter and leave the building, to whom they no longer even greet, while they try to understand something of what they say. “As you see, this is no longer designed to live in,” they say. According to a count prepared by EL PAÍS at street level, portal by portal, in the main artery of Madrid – where an average of 140,000 people pass through daily – of the 78 blocks that make up the street, only in 18 there is still an owner who remains a permanent resident. If number 68 is excluded, where the remodeling of the building was completed in 2019 to convert it exclusively into luxury homes – 48 in total – in the rest of the street there are only about 60 residents who live permanently. The rest, hotels – there are 26 on the entire street -, hostels – more than 20 -, offices and, above all, tourist rental apartments that are impossible to quantify. The data provided by the Madrid City Council speaks, however, of 577 registered residents – 223 foreigners -, a figure that could also include renters or Madrid residents who keep their registry there while living in another address. Valeria and Juan Antonio moved in 2016 to the epicenter of Madrid. After completing their work period, they decided to remodel their own office where they had both worked in an expert office. A property of more than 150 square meters that they converted into a home when they still thought that Gran Vía could be their neighborhood. From the threshold of the street, the couple watches with concern a man who picks up the bags of food that the employees of the Rodilla, next to their doorway, deposit in the buckets on the sidewalk. “It is a striking contrast. Above us the rooms cost 200 euros a night and here this. It is a street without its own stamp, without identity, without ideology, without personality,” the woman points out. That morning, the two went to the City Council office on Atocha Street to file a complaint precisely because of the garbage accumulated on the road. “Do it if you want. “It is not the first nor the last,” the official told them.
Several German tourists dine in a tourist apartment on Gran Vía. David ExpósitoThe couple tries not to get carried away by the nostalgic and hackneyed discourse so recurrent among those who resist. “I admit that, unlike Antonio, I do like Gran Vía,” Valeria acknowledges when her husband walks away a few meters. “Although I hate it at the same time,” adds the woman, who goes to the Santa María de la Cabeza market – five kilometers away – to make her purchase, according to her due to the lack of local “and quality” commerce in her area. around. “The Gran Vía has its good things: it seems like you are the center of the universe all the time. On the other hand, there are many inconveniences, such as the fact that we can only ventilate our house from the back, the one that faces Isabel la Católica street. The wind there is much healthier,” adds Antonio. “When you come to live you assume that it is a noisy and hectic place. What we must warn about now, in addition, is that the noise from the street, after having opened the doors of the buildings wide to tourists, is transferred to the interior of the homes. Parties, dirt on the landings… Those who do not belong to a place do not take care of it in the same way. And no one is from here,” Valeria complains while her husband announces agitatedly from the elevator as if he had discovered some secret, pointing to the buttons on the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th floors, completely worn out. «There!. That's where they do the business. “There are the tourist apartments!” he implores. “We are a block with homes, not a community of neighbors. To be a community you need to know who lives across the street or next door. I have no idea who the others are, nor do they know who I am. Deep down I am a stranger just like them.”, he concludes. The number 68 could be said to be the exception that proves the rule. Crowned with one of the four Phoenix Birds in Madrid, it was built between 1944 and 1947 by the architect José María Díaz Plaja. It was one of the last sections to be built on Gran Vía and has a 608 square meter plot with 11 floors in total. It was once occupied by offices, until the American investment group Oaktree took over the property and began a luxury residential project. In 2017, the first promotion began to be sold. According to the cadastre, the apartments range from 66 square meters to 310, with a value that ranged from 500,000 euros to 2.7 million. “In the first batch of buyers there were quite a few individuals, but above all agencies that were looking for a investment,” says neighbor Ángeles M., 48, who purchased a home in the block with her partner, with whom she returned from a stay in California in 2019, when she allowed herself to move in. “From the first moment we realized that this was not going to be what we had imagined. The impact of the tourist apartments, which were throughout the building, was very great. It was a profile of young people with a lot of money who destroyed our property. «If we started like this, it was clear that this was going to end up being a lawless hotel,» he recalls. It was then that the bulk of the neighboring owners and regular residents, during a community meeting, voted in favor of prohibiting tourist apartments and initiated a judicial process that was favorable to them. At this time, entry to the block is not done with a key, but through digital access control with a fingerprint to prevent anyone who does not appear in the “legal registry” from accessing the facilities. In addition, they have a 24-hour doorman who serves as a second retaining wall, as well as several signs along the porch titled Tourist Rental Prohibition. “We have avoided the coming and going of people, although some shameless people who claim to have arrived before the new statutes still resist. Tenants of the apartments left for rent must demonstrate that their stay will be minimally long and that they agree to comply with the rules. What we want is a community of neighbors. Even if you are in the most touristy place in Madrid, we want to get to know the people we live with,” adds Ángeles.
Antonio Muñoz, doorman of one of the properties, on the terrace where he has had his apartment for 22 years. David ExpósitoAntonio Muñoz is a man against nostalgia. At 59 years old, he is one of the veterans among the twenty doormen who remain alive in their guardhouses, who today are in many cases the only tenant of their respective buildings. “No one calls us at dawn anymore, that's the good thing,” he says ironically. Muñoz, a happy, lively man freshly scented after his nap, has been listening to the echoes of the Chicote Bar Museum all his life, which is on the other side of the wall. He refuses to tell any jokes while he walks around the building as if collecting memories while diligently cleaning the dust left by the workers leaving some renovation. “All of these are pieces of my life. Things that I no longer have,» he says at the end of the typical anecdote of how he arrived in Madrid in 1970 at the age of five, like so many other Spaniards from the provinces. A few months ago the company he works for warned him that it was going to respect his contract, but that when he retires, he will not be replaced. Several cleaning workers will be in charge of maintenance, while the small attic apartment in which Muñoz lives – now alone, once with his ex-wife and two children – will be renovated, re-let or sold outright. “What gives me the most vertigo is the day I come down permanently, set foot on the street, and after 30 years I don't know anyone,” he laments. His melancholy is interrupted by a Filipino woman with a child attached to her leg. “Do you speak English?” she asks. Antonio shakes his head in doubt as he says “Yes.” The woman wants to know if there are any cheap hostels and shows him her cell phone with the names of those on the fourth and sixth floors. Muñoz, without losing his composure, points his finger at the boy and tells him that in his building the hostels are “for adults only.” “This is going to be a fuchsia pink street like neon lights, populated by people who don't even know where they are,” he predicts.
Agustín, a resident of Gran Vía, does some Bikram yoga exercises on the terrace of his building. David Expósito Almost 60 meters above the average mortal on Gran Vía, there is a man no more than 1.55 meters tall, who looks at the rest as if he did not belong to that world. Agustín Vázquez, 75, improvises a Bikram yoga session on the roof of the Palacio de la Prensa. He, who rules more than anyone else in his building, is the only one who has the key to open, as he says, “the doors of heaven.” Under his feet is his house, where he has been for more than 20 years. “Gran Vía began its decline in the 90s, with the arrival of department stores, the closure of theaters, cinemas and small stores. Then the hotels arrive, and they begin to expel the neighbors. Now it is not necessary to buy an entire block and open your business, you just have to go here and there in the free spaces and set up your tourist apartments,” he says. “He has stopped having personality. When you prostitute something that belongs to everyone, to everyone who was from here, you turn it into a common element, without more, without identity. The capitals are all, deep down, the same city,” he concludes as he lowers his leg from the wall, before observing his neighbors, four Germans enjoying dinner on a small balcony of the Gran View Apartment, at number 48.