"When you come to Madrid, my chulapa..."
Party. It has several scenarios. The main one is the Pradera, where the booths for food and drink, the Ferris wheel and the bumper cars are installed, where you can hum with the little girls to the rhythm of techno or cantaditas. Then there is the Verbena de las Vistillas and las Ventas, where the spontaneous give the passes in the nearby bars in a wide schedule, and lots of activities here and there . It's all on this website.
Public. The different spaces of San Isidro deserve a little attention from UNESCO for what they have as an anthropological reserve. It is one of the few events that manages to bring together what remains of the urban tribes that related the Madrid of the 80s with the Andaman Islands. Like them, there were genetically pure tribal redoubts with a closed ecosystem with their own languages and hostility to everything that came from abroad. In any concert, the Pradera de San Isidro is filled with punks, heavies, quinquis, a kind of skins and whatever they throw at it. Dressing urban tribe requires an effort of documentation and there are those who make some mistakes with styling. You can get to see an attempt at punk who ends up looking like Boy George, which makes him a little less fearsome and a lot less anti-establishment than he intended. Or that other man who tries hard to look like an extra from "Stray Dogs" with his Adidas t-shirt in blinding gold topped by a gold chain (let's say) from a big toe , but that he has unwittingly become a music video rapper.
Chulapos. There are entire families dressed as chulapos and older couples dancing chotis treacherously on any piece of grass . It is endearing and also sometimes they drag cars that are more like wagons. They are loaded with homemade food in tupperware that can be yours in exchange for some applause.
The menu. The gallinejas are the star gastronomic elaboration. Everything else is mostly sandwiches self-disintegrating bread with something greasy inside , pinchos morunos and patatas bravas that are also served in minis but in this case you do not have to mix them with alcohol even if it is a vegetable and vegetables are added to the gin and tonics. Not this one.
Beverages. The booths of the Pradera are the ideal place to debut in that the last one feels bad, a premiere as unforgettable as a first girlfriend. The minis are large plastic cups that can contain tetra brik calimocho, a half-and-half mix of beer and foam and alcoholic cocktails. In San Isidro there are fewer top brands than fourth or fifth brands. They are egalitarian drinks that achieve the feat of making you unable to distinguish whether what you have been served is El Pedal rum, La Cruda tequila or some other cleaning product.
Political booths. In Spain, in addition to voting every four years, the other participatory thing that is well seen is exercise democracy by deciding whether to buy a sandwich at the booth of the PP, the PSOE or the IU . You can see that these are popular festivals in which IU's booth has a queue and the others don't, a bit unlike in life.
Smells. The sense of smell is essential here. San Isidro smells of grease from the plates , to urine, to joint and to the Nivea of the first burns of the year. Except in groups of guiris, which are more Coppertone. In the end, it doesn't matter either, because everything is equalized by the smell of smoke from the sandwiches, which allows people at home to guess that you have just celebrated San Isidro from the doorway. Either that, or a fire.
Bulls. The farmers and the bulls are a well-known couple that in these holidays translates into the most important bullfighting poster in the world, they say, and the one that manages to extend the celebration of the saint beyond what is reasonable, until the beginning of June. The main merit of the San Isidro fair is to preserve traditions nationals that would be lost without it, mainly the sun and shade and the toothpick in the mouth.
Groups. San Isidro, Cine de Barrio and the ambulatory are the places where you can meet again with the great pop stars of the 60s.
San Isidro. He is holy because a thousand years ago he arrived late to the field while he stopped at all the churches to pray, so the angels came down to help him till his land and, by the way, they pulled his son out of a well. If San Isidro were here, the miraculous process susceptible to beatification would have been rather to stop for a calimocho in each booth, for Los Chichos to wait for him to start the concert and for him to find a free taxi at the end.
* This article was originally published on May 13, 2013.
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