A trip across the city to Tres Cantos. Two hours and a different world.
A friend of mine sent me word recently that she had opened a bookstore in her home in Tres Cantos since the last time we saw each other. She told me that it was generally quiet on Saturday mornings before the noon story hour for children, so I promised to drop by and visit. Since Tres Cantos is quite a ways, and I was up late last night, I ended up getting there after instead of before, but as it was a long holiday weekend the store was quiet, and we had a lovely chat and mugs of tea and I got to see the very cool little neighborhood bookstore Serendipias. (Check out their website for pretty pictures of the store interior, and also upcoming events there.)
Tres Cantos is not technically "Madrid Capital," but rather an independent city in the larger Comunidad de Madrid. It sits to the north, relatively near Barajas airport, and also to the enormous reserve of El Pardo. It's accessible by intercity buses (cost 2.60 € for those who don't have the "Zone B-2" transportation card) and by the RENFE Cercanías trains. (It's about three stops to Chamartín, on the line terminating in Colmenar Viejo, and takes about 20 minutes by train to Chamartin or 30 by bus to the Plaza de Castilla.) So it's basically like going to one of the nearer commuter towns of Long Island or Westchester (or Connecticut) from New York. Imagine Great Neck, or Scarsdale, or Ridgefield. But it's hard to imagine a more different model of city (or rather suburb) planning.
Last night I watched a film on TV which ended in Barajas in the 1990s, in the old Terminal 3, where the international flights used to land before they built the inconvenient new T4. It made me a bit nostalgic for the Madrid I remembered from the mid-90s, with its little airport which had no direct metro link to the city center (much less cercanías) and depended on buses to the Plaza de Colón. I remember taking a taxi to the airport to go home early in the morning, and being shocked by the chabolas (tent cities, or slums) that existed just north of the city, by the side of the highway that ran to Barajas.
Nowadays there are no more slums of plastic sheeting and corrugated iron to the north. (God knows what happened to the people who were living there, and where they have been pushed to. I have noticed that it seems inevitable that there is a beggar at the entrance to any chain supermarket in Madrid, though the non-chain carnicerías and fruterías and so on never have anyone in front of them. I don't know where los sin techo, as the Spanish call the homeless, sleep in Madrid now.) Instead, there are gleaming new suburbs, with five and six story brick buildings and long avenues with new baby trees.
Tres Cantos is not quite one of these brand-new suburbs, but it is fairly new, and the organization of it is interesting, in that it looks like an attempt to plan a town which exists as a satellite of a larger city (and thus needs good transportation) but that is not car dependent. It's interesting to see how that works out in practice.
I thought my friend Elena was being merely perverse when she gave me directions to the bookstore and told me to "ask the bus driver for the stop nearest the telepizza" rather than giving me an exact street. But it turns out that the buses run along the relatively few main arteries of Tres Cantos, which are all divided four lane deals like Broadway at best, or like a small highway, and are all named "Avenida de ...." something. The bus stops along the various "Avenidas" sometimes at intersections with other streets, but more often simply at a given number along the Avenida. Behind and between the broad Avenidas are lots that are laid out in plazas and streets and so on but are completely pedestrianized (frequently raised from the street level, and with stairs, I suspect to provide underground parking). The architecture is (as I say) mostly five and six stories, and almost all red brick and somewhat boringly uniform, with apartments above, and small businesses at "street" level. Except it doesn't look like streets. It looks like semi-private space between buildings in a development, until you walk closer, and realize that there are cafes with terrazas, and barbers, and grocery stores, and stationery stores, and one lone and successful book store, and that it really is meant to be public space, just public space envisioned with a complete and strict separation between cars and pedestrians. The avenues are lined with businesses too, including the larger chain supermarkets (which I suspect use trucks for loading and unloading), and the telepizza of course, and several banks (I stopped and got cash at one), as well as a post office and other things. At least, that's the part of Tres Cantos that's the "Centro Comercial." There's also a "Centro Industrial" lined with big glass buildings that look rather corporate, and might include the odd factory (again, along the tree lined avenues, but with pedestrian spaces between them), and a "Centro Ciudad" with the Ayuntamiento de Tres Cantos, the railroad station, and other public buildings.
On the whole, I think I rather liked the arrangement of Tres Cantos, although the absolutely strict segregation of cars and people was a little weird. For one thing, it didn't seem to leave much space for bicycles, although I did notice (separately set off, not in traffic or on the sidewalk) bike paths around the ayuntamiento and the railroad station had several bike racks that were half filled, so people may well go to the station by bike and from there into Madrid Ciudad.
The town was quiet on a sunny Saturday afternoon, partly no doubt because the four day weekend meant that a lot of people were out of town. Generally it gave the impression of a fat, well-groomed, housecat, asleep on a comfortable carpet in a patch of afternoon sunshine: irresistibly contented and pleased with itself. I took the bus to the book store (following directions) but walked part of the way back, and abandoned the plan of taking the bus back to the Plaza de Castilla after just missing one, and finding out that they only run every 45 minutes on weekends. I followed the (of course aimed at pedestrians) signs back to the railway station, and waited less than ten minutes for a Cercanías train, which rolled smoothly into the station on time, on tracks surrounded not by residential buildings or even small businesses, but rather large glass corporate headquarters, bearing the names of multinationals. (I noted Siemens, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, and Huawei, among others.) These are the markers of prosperity, even more than the residential buildings, and there are even a few tell tale cranes, putting up new large headquarters along the tracks, which suggests irresistibly that while Spain as a whole may not have recovered from la crisis, in Tres Cantos business is good. Much has been made in the news lately of the flight of businesses from Catalunya in light of the political upheaval there. But I suspect that the much vaunted Catalan nationalism, far from being the complaint - whether virtuous or selfish depending on your point of view - of "the most prosperous region of Spain" that they were being "robbed" of tax dollars was actually fed by the far more pernicious uncertainty of a region already losing jobs and industry to Madrid (and perhaps to other cities as well, but in Madrid it's very obvious that growth is happening). The Catalan nationalists may be less the rich and industrious bourgeois of cliche, and more like the sad post-industrial heartlands in other countries, that saw their secure jobs and standard of living slipping away and sought a scapegoat in the places that were stealing "their" factories.
In any case, the only faint pencil traces of poverty I saw in Tres Cantos were the handwritten flyers pasted to the bus shelter of a "señora peruana de nacionalidad española" who was seeking work as a housekeeper. There were certainly no beggars, and the stores were those focused on middle class clientele. The town is not only prosperous but apparently solidly conservative, since on the same bus shelter I also saw a poster inviting one and all citizens to "a celebration of ten years of government by the Partido Popular in Tres Cantos on October 11" which advertised that they would have "the representative of the government, Pablo Casado." Said Casado is young, handsome (in a Paul Ryan kind of way) and has an inability to not say regrettable things (very much like Paul Ryan). His latest mal mot was a suggestion that Puigdemont was repeating the steps of Catalan martyr LLuis Companys "and would end up like him" which led to some awkward throat clearing and then a reporter saying something along the lines of "ummmm....could you clarify whether you mean arrested, like in '34, or tortured and then shot like in '40?" (With the unspoken addition of "because I'm pretty sure the latter is currently illegal, no matter what Puigdemont may have done, and also you're creeping me out.") Casado later issued a standard politician's sorry-not sorry apology for being unclear that he only meant arrest. Since he only made that particular comment a couple of days ago, and the celebration was for October 11, the poster was almost certainly printed and posted before he said it, but still, advertising him as a draw suggests that Tres Cantos has some very conservative residents indeed.
This is a shame, because it is in a many ways and lovely and well-designed town, with a real attempt to create a culture of pedestrian communities, and relatively high density in what is essentially a suburb. It is unquestionably nicer than any of the dead expanses of lawn and strip mall that make up most US suburbs. Perhaps the PP has only a very small majority here. (The nice little maps at the corners of the main car arteries which show where businesses are and the pedestrian walkways and so on labeled one of the roundabouts "Plaza de los víctimas del terrorismo." Since said roundabout leads to the "Avenida Colmenar Viejo" and my strongest association with Colmenar Viejo is International Brigade member Canute Frankson's harrowing description of watching low flying fascist planes strafing terrified civilians, I couldn't help but think that it all depended which "víctimas del terrorismo" you were honoring. Of course, it's simply the Avenida Colmenar Viejo because it's the old road to Colmenar Viejo - probably the one Frankson describes - but the coincidence struck me.)
In any case, once I was on the train I decided to stay on it all the way to Atocha, where I picked up the friendly bus which drops me at my door. (Taking the buses on holiday weekends is great because when there's no traffic they go really fast.) And while I can't deny that the pedestrian plazas of Tres Cantos are nice, and that its Avenidas with trees are pretty, the old, familiar, bad design of the Avenida General Ricardos, with its way too wide street and loud traffic, and packed sidewalks on either side was kind of comforting. It was nice to be home.
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