The mountain

Since childhood I’ve been obsessed with a small mountain that you can see from my parents’ house and that marks the limit between city and nature. I always liked that and felt lucky to have that view to escape the city.

This part of land is the next to be developed and probably this view will change a lot, not being anymore possible to see the countryside but more buildings.

Inspired also by a set of conferences I was reading those days about experiencing the exteriority, I decided to go walking from home to there for the first time with my recording setup, on Christmas Eve.

First adventure

It was more than an hour and half walking, crossing the last blocks of houses, the train lines, and a lot of roads to be finally in the edge of the city and near that area.

Just before arriving there was a crazy public storage for abbandoned cars from the city town hall, the sun was starting to go down and the view was amazing.

On this parts of the non-city there’s no one and the atmosphere is strange. I felt excited but also somehow insecure.

I went up a first small mountain (not the one you can see from home) but with a good view, and realized some slum houses nearby, where I could see they were preparing the meal for this special day. I saw also some signs on walls indicating Las Barranquillas, and after doing a couple of recordings I went back to investigate this name that sounded familiar.

It was already getting dark and the wayback was long so I went back to my neighborhood and felt like entering back to life with the streets full of music of people celebrating tardebuena before dinner.

Las Barranquillas

Back home the next days I did some researchm and Las Barranquillas ended up being a large informal slum town for decades characterized by self-built housing, social exclusion, and later by intense police presence linked to drug trafficking and forced evictions.

They said that more than 5000 people came every day to buy drugs and actually some early youtube videos shows us a very different picture of the same road I walked the day before.

The settlement was dismantled in 2007 due to urban development and especulation interests, displacing most of this people to La Cañada Real, except some houses that resisted the eviction (as the one I saw), but planned construction was halted by the 2008 real estate crisis, leaving the land empty for years, until now that they are starting to build again.

I decided to go back with Adrian on the days after with more time.

Second exploration

On a Sunday rainy day we went to the place again and we arrived to the exact place were the settlement was. The constructions where arriving there already.

But what an impression and strange feeling to see all the evicted town after 9 years. Didn’t expected to have so many house structures, personal belongings and objects there:

We did some recordings on the site and finally went up the mountain I saw from the window.

Up there the view was amazing: on one side, the city ladscape, on the other, the lands leading to Aranjuez, Rivas, and the M40 road dividing everything and filling the silence.

We did some recordings there, and stay for some minutes listening thinking how all the view and the soundscape will change.