Status Updates From Madrid: A New Biography

Much as it spoke to a limited audience, la movida was part of the reinvention of Madrid as a dynamic and expansive capital, one the thousands of children of migrants from other parts of Spain could proudly call their home. Madrid was no longer the remedy to their parents’ lives, but the starting point for their own.

“From the very first moment, Madrid was the city I had been looking for.”
- Julio Llamazares

Fighting against traitors within and invaders without, as Antonio Machado put it; Madrid as heroic city of resistance was not a myth but a tradition, dating back to the times of Napoleon.

During the opening months of the war, its defiant role—Madrid as the international front line against fascism—had been an inspiration to thousands around the world: a capital city destined to fall had refused to do so and, as support for the city gathered and its resistance hardened, the effects of its stubborn, courageous first months under siege ripped out across the world.

From the reign of Carlos III to the death of Franco are two centuries of enormous upheaval and conflict, of change and suffering, and of the survival and reinvention of a great city. These are remarkable years, at the end of which Madrid emerged, with a shout and a scream, and came roaring back into the world.

Image and reality battled together in baroque Madrid, a constant interplay of truth and falsehood: the world as theatre, in which nothing was quite as it seems, and theatre as a representation of the world.

“I told myself I was going to Madrid where nobody knew me…and I would get on through my own merits…in Madrid you can find all types, half-wits and sharp minds, the very rich and the very poor. The city hides criminals and a good man’s qualities are not appreciated…We live by our wits.”
- Francisco de Quevedo, The Swindler

“It was right that so great a Monarchy should have a city which could function as its heart—a vital centre in the midst of the body, which ministered equally to every State in time of peace and war.”
- Luis Cabrera de Córdoba

“Madrid is a strange place…I do not believe anyone much likes it when he first goes there. It has none of the look that you expect of Spain…when you get to know it, it is the most Spanish of all cities, the best to live in, the finest people, month in and month out the finest climate.”
- Ernest Hemingway