Malasaña Backstreets: Rebellious Suburb to Hipster Haven

Burning corpses, sex crazed nuns, revolution and prostitution! Even before becoming the hipster paradise it is today, Malasaña has never been boring.

On this tour of Malasaña’s backstreets, you’ll find out about its roots as a pious yet somewhat sleazy suburb. You’ll also hear about the Dos de Mayo uprisings against the French in 1808, and the Movida cultural revolution at the end of the dictatorship.

The tour starts outside the old city walls at Plaza de la Luna, in front of the former cinema Cines de la Luna – in an area where heretics were once taken to be burned at the stake. You’ll wind through narrow streets to the Church of San Antonio de los Alemanes – Madrid’s answer to the Sistine Chapel. Along the way, you’ll hear about King Felipe IV’s saucy nocturnal adventures, and the shocking events at San Placido convent that scandalised Madrid’s nobility in the 1600s.

You’ll then head to Plaza Dos de Mayo, where rebel captains Daoiz and Velarde helped ordinary citizens fight Napoleon’s occupation during a doomed uprising. I’ll tell you the story of Manuela Malasaña, a seamstress who was shot for wielding scissors in front of French soldiers and later gave the neighbourhood its unofficial name.

You’ll have a chance to visit the bars where the Movida movement exploded in the 1980s, when artists like Pedro Almodóvar and Alaska y Dinarama turned Malasaña into Madrid’s creative epicentre after decades of dictatorship. The tour ends outside Museo de la Historia de Madrid, the city’s splendid history museum. Housed in an 18th-century hospice with a spectacular baroque entrance, here you can delve deeper into the city’s turbulent past.

On this 60-minute tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Walk past Teatro Lara with its chocolate-box facade and learn about Microteatro, a compact form of theatre invented in a former brothel
• See a creative graffiti montage grown from a guerrilla garden and go down Calle del Pez, a street named after a legendary fish that’s brimming with creative street art
• Discover the sex scandals swirling around the Convent of San Placido
• Learn about Concepción Arenal, who disguised herself as a man to attend university lectures in the 1800s
• Visit the tiny house of Ratoncito Perez, Spain’s answer to the tooth fairy
• Admire the stunning 1920s tilework at Casa Macareno and Farmacia Juanse
• Stop at the bars where Spain’s post-Franco countercultural revolution took off

This neighbourhood has always attracted rebels, artists, and free thinkers – you’ll understand why by the time you’re done!