Thursday, March 28

The Christmas carpet that confronts merchants and residents of Chamberí with the Madrid City Council


Saturday December 4 was a holiday in Fernández de los Ríos. For the first time on this road in the Arapiles neighborhood (Chamberí), some thirty of its merchants had agreed to decorate the section of its street. And they had encouraged their neighbors to do it together with them, inviting them to have chocolate with churros.

Commercial-neighborhood meeting to decorate a street in Chamberí for Christmas

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“We wanted to involve the neighbors so that it was not just a commercial thing, there were people who even brought tinsel and we put mailboxes to deliver letters to the Three Wise Men,” says Ricardo Velasco, a street host and one of the initiative’s ideologues. . The central element of the decoration was a long red carpet, 300 meters (150 on each sidewalk of the street) to decorate the block, which the merchants had paid at the cleavage -50 euros per beard- in imitation of what is done each Christmas in many cities of the national geography.

The good vibes created between merchants and neighbors was interrupted that same day, with the arrival of the Municipal Police. The agents demanded their withdrawal by order of the Board of Chamberí, something that the merchants could not believe. At 5:00 p.m., two garbage trucks with eight employees appeared to remove it, to the protests of those who were there on the street. Finally, the cleaning service manager preferred to leave everything as it was, in the absence of a written order for removal: “He told me that he did not remove it because it was beautiful, that he wished they had decorated his street like that,” recalls Ricardo.

The conflict did not end there. Chamberí councilor Javier Ramírez (PP) sent a letter several days later to the merchants. In it, he accused them of having occupied “public property” and demanded the removal of the carpets in two days, for which, he stressed, he had not requested permission. Failure to do so would expose himself to possible “coercive fines”, according to the document signed by the mayor.

Before receiving the letter, the merchants tried to regularize the situation by talking to the Chamberí Board, but no one answered them. “It is true that we should have communicated it before, but later we wanted to do it asking for permission and there was no way they would pay attention to us,” laments the merchant, who does not consider that making a street more beautiful with a carpet is “taking advantage of public space.” He also affirms that “the people are extremely upset with the councilor” because of the attitude he has maintained towards the residents and businessmen of the neighborhood in this matter. “What damage does a carpet laid for ten days do? Are there not more urgent things to worry about in this city?” He laments from his store, the Albatross Tavern, which opened seven years ago.

The carpet disappeared from Fernández de los Ríos on December 23, the day before Christmas Eve and within the deadline set by the City Council. Traders dismantled it and a garbage truck collected it days after where it had been piled up. But its placement was not in vain: the union of the stores for this action has been the beginning of an association of merchants, At street level, with which Ricardo and other neighborhood establishments plan to organize more things: “It is the first time that merchants have joined together and we are going to continue doing things, although some want to discourage us,” he says.





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