Madrid has always have been the main and most familiar way out of Europe travelling west and a city that I always like to visit because of its welcoming-rusty and dusty attitude, the botellón culture and the easiness with which you stumble on locals and get taken into the endless city nightlife.
Lavapiés is a district that makes me feel like home every time I visit, especially when I stand in front of El Tres drinking cañas and thinking about how to spend the rest of the evening. La Chueca and Malasaña were the places were I spent my first Madrid days during my early twenties, coming from Andalusia and heading to Catalunya where I was going to start a new life in Barcelona.
Santiago Bernabeu is the stadium where I had my greatest satisfaction as a football fan and a pretty wild and unforgettable after party afterwards.
The inspiring working class barrio of Vallecas with its tough living conditions, used to be one of the most dangerous of the city and it still keeps nowadays its left wing mentality as can be seen through the life of a criminal who lost his soul that jumped from the eight floor or a social house, leaving him and his tatooes motionless on the balcony looking down, as in Melendi's Mesías de Vallecas.
Madrid was also the place where I started my journey to Morocco, Mexico and Colombia, without really having the time to rest before leaving because the noise calling me from the street was asking me to go out all the time.
The last time I was there only for a brief visit of one day before jumping on a flight to Bogotá. We decided to squeeze in a visit to El Prado, rushing through the museum like the folks from Bande a part, trying to see the most in the least amount of time, running through my favourite painting ever, The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, looking at it from all sides and then going past the flickering Maya who keeps getting dress and undress, to all the Caravaggios and the incredible way that he had to master light and to how it must feel to face death with a shotgun coming from a foreign domination pointed in front, like on the 3rd of May 1808 or how it must feel to be the astonishing Viejo desnudo al sol, enjoying the last bits of his life under the sun, careless, free, joyful and unshamingly beautiful.