This October, for the first time since 2011, Lavapies does not celebrate its tapas and music festival. Its own organizers canceled it in 2025 after an edition that got out of hand. But there will be tapas. Tomorrow, Thursday, October 22, starting at 8:00 p.m., a group of neighbors will set up a table on Cabestreros Street to celebrate Lovetapa, a homemade tapas competition where in addition to cooking, you have to name the recipe with a name that stands for moderation.
table on the street Behind it is Lavapiés al Límite, a group that organizes monthly meetings in neighborhood streets to report issues affecting neighbors. This month it’s time for politeness and tourism, and they’ve chosen to say it with food. Anyone who wants to compete must bring at least ten servings of their own recipe. The prize is an anti-gentrification kit, though they haven’t detailed what it includes. La Tortuga Cultural Center will also have a performance.
The call is open to anyone. Anyone who doesn’t want to cook can just go, and the organizers encourage you to bring some snacks to share and even a chair to sit and chat. They ask to inform in advance, yes, to calculate capacity. If there’s one image that sums up the difference with a festival that doesn’t take place, it’s this: dozens of bars or thousands of spectators don’t have a route, but rather someone with an occasional folding chair and Tupperware.
Why on that road? Because here they meet in front of the old Baobab, the Senegalese restaurant that closed a few years ago and whose building was torn down to make way for a hotel. According to elDiario.es the project is a capsule hotel, and its demolition caused a political and judicial dispute: in June, TSJM stopped work on two buildings due to possible historical value at the request of the PSOE, while Urban Planning maintained that the third had a developer’s license. The group chose that street to say goodbye to the place, claiming that “Lavapi’s need a place to live, meet and create a neighborhood.”
The festival is the death of success. It is advisable not to mix things up, as the canceled Tapapiés and the dismantled Baobab are different stories that collectively come together under the same umbrella. As we said earlier, the festival was born in 2011 by the Merchants Association, with the idea of attracting visitors to less touristic neighborhoods and strengthening small businesses.
And it worked like a charm. In 2025, the La Corrala Neighborhood Association reported street noise, dirt, alcohol consumption and difficulty relaxing and moving around, with areas “out of control”. Not in vain the organizers themselves admitted that they even considered postponing it during the first weekend. The Merchants Association announced in September that it was postponing until 2027, to find a more sustainable format that makes hospitality compatible with residents’ relaxation, as explained by its president, Carmen Gordo.
on the other side For many small bars, that eleventh day was more than a party. One of the owners, Antonio Amago, described it as an economic “lifesaver”: at his location, daily sales increased by 75% during the festival and, according to the organizers, the collective turnover of the neighborhood increased by about 25%. Other institutions, elDiario.es noted, have already decided to stop participating due to saturation. Lavtapa does not respond to that problem. This raises another question: what happens when a neighborhood is oriented outward toward Assad.
It is clear that flow is the sustenance for those who make a living from the hospitality industry; For those who live on the streets, it is a noisy and impassable road; And for the group, both are a neighborhood symptom that transforms into a pure showcase for the audience. That Lavapiés has 80 or more nationalities registered and a cuisine that reflects what it attracts and what it wants to protect is part of it.
what’s coming Tomorrow we will see how many people can sit on the streets with tables, chairs, tapas with protest names. It doesn’t seem like a big scale. But it comes in a week where housing takes over the whole square: there are camps in Sol and Barcelona, and the flag again after fifteen years of 15-M housing. Through these movements we actively discuss who makes decisions for the neighborhood.
Picture | CGT South Region
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