Alison Hughes offers up a "musical report" on Lavapiés, one of Madrid's oldest and most central neighborhoods. From its start the barrio was "popular," which translates into English as working class or literally "of the people." Lavapiés was first settled in the fifteenth century, outside of the city walls and as part of the trade route to Toledo. After that, the slaughterhouses on the lower edges of the neighborhood provided not only the jobs but the trading hub. The humble or modest classes settled here and that has always been the case. In the 1950's and 60's, the mass of Spaniards who converged upon the capital, abandoning their rural villages, fleeing the poverty that followed the Civil War, and seeking employment in the city, in its industries and services, found their homes in this neighborhood of steep hills, and narrow streets. Today and over the past twenty years, the population of Lavapiés has been supplied, no longer by internal immigration but by international immigration (20/08/14).
