Tumbling down the hill from the elegant facades and manicured squares of central Madrid, Lavapiés is a parallel world to one Europe’s most sophisticated capital cities. Its narrow lanes are lined with the shabby symbols of modern multiculturalism: shopfronts offering money transfers to Africa and cheap phone calls to South America; grocery stores selling the produce of China or Bangladesh; groups of Moroccans passing the day with watchful eyes. Elderly Spanish residents lean out the windows and call across the street to their neighbours.
Lavapiés has always been peopled with immigrants; first Spaniards from elsewhere in the country drawn to the capital in search of opportunity, then foreigners called by Spain’s economic miracle that has transformed the country into Europe’s largest recipient of immigrants.
This marriage of tradition and diversity in Lavapiés has special importance on a continent made suddenly uneasy by conflicts with its burgeoning immigrant populations. Debates are being dominated less by the numbers gathered on Europe’s doorstep, than by how to live in harmony with those who are already here.
By 2050, 40 per cent of Europe's population will be recent immigrants or their offspring. "European cities will not be recognisable within 40 years," argues American sociologist Saskia Sassen. "They will become truly global places. They will become global cities."
So it is that Lavapiés, this deprived inner-city suburb surrounded by the continent’s wealth, and peopled with Spain’s most multicultural population, has become a testing ground of Europe’s future.
For much of the 20th century, Spain was a country of emigrants. It was not until 1991 that more people came to live in Spain than left it. In 2000, there were 900,000 foreigners living in Spain, less than 2 per cent of the population. That figure now stands at four million.
The response among ordinary Spaniards to Spain’s new status as an immigrant country has been a study in contradictions.
Since 1999 there have been isolated anti-immigrant protests in towns across Spain, and a recent government poll found that 60 per cent of Spaniards believe that there are too many immigrants in the country. With unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants arriving on the shores of Spain’s Canary Islands—27,000 arrived by boat in the first nine months of this year—another poll in August found that 64 per cent of the population believes that immigration is the most pressing issue facing Spain, ahead of terrorism and unemployment.
Yet a different government survey in early