As Christmas approaches, many Madrid residents try to avoid the city center. I also decided to escape the hustle and headed to Orcasitas — a neighborhood just a few kilometers from Puerta del Sol, yet it feels like another world. Today, the gap between the center and the outskirts is obvious, but in the 1960s it was truly enormous. While festive window displays adorned the heart of the city, Orcasitas lacked electricity, running water, or paved roads. There was only mud and an endless struggle for basic necessities.
The word “mud” (barro) often appears in the memories of longtime residents, in newspaper articles, and in old photographs of this neighborhood. In the 1950s and 60s, people flocked here from the countryside, leaving deserted villages in search of a better life. What awaited them was not a promised land, but thick clay from which they had to build both their new homes and their futures.
The people of Orcasitas built not only their homes but their own civic identity. They joined forces to demand basic services, and that’s how the first neighbor associations were born. One of them, the Orcasitas Neighbors Association, was founded in 1970. A young Félix López-Rey recalled these events in the 1975 documentary “La ciudad es nuestra” by director Toni Calabuig.
The memory of the outskirts
Orcasitas is not the only neighborhood where residents fought for their rights, but it was here that the movement gained particular recognition. A similar story unfolded in the Barcelona district of Torre Baró, which has recently come back into the spotlight. However, neither Manuel Vital nor López-Rey acted alone—only by working together were residents able to achieve change.
The Orcasitas Association has been around for 55 years. Over this time, it has accumulated a vast collection of documents, photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, and even old bills. These are not just pieces of paper, but a living record of how ordinary people changed their lives and their city. Now this archive has become part of the national collection—the Historical Archive of Social Movements, overseen by the Ministry of Culture.
Alongside the Orcasitas archive, other materials related to the Federación Regional de Asociaciones Vecinales de Madrid (FRAVM) are also being added to the collection. This means that memories of life on the outskirts of the capital will be preserved and made accessible to everyone.
Documents and destinies
What does this archive hold? Here you’ll find everything from old reports and receipts to photographs, flyers, amateur magazines, CDs, slides, and newspaper clippings. The earliest document dates back to 1961—now part of the national heritage. All this will be available for research once the process of cleaning, restoration, and cataloguing is complete.
The Orcasitas residents’ movement has long become a part of history, and now it has received official recognition. Archives play a vital role in preserving the past so that future generations can learn how life developed on the outskirts of large cities.
If ancient censuses had survived, like the one conducted in Judea under Emperor Augustus, we would know much more about the lives of ordinary people. But even small personal stories, like the tale of how one girl’s grandmother from Orcasitas sent her a chicken from the village every Christmas, become part of our collective memory. Today this woman is 71, no longer lives in the neighborhood, but she remembers meeting the bird at the bus stop as a child. The chicken traveled in a basket covered with cloth, with grain to eat along the way. Back then, this was a typical Christmas dinner for those who couldn’t afford an expensive turkey.
Living History
These memories aren’t just family anecdotes—they are an essential part of Spain’s documentary heritage. They tell us how people survived, built homes, fought for electricity and water, and changed their neighborhood together. Now these stories won’t disappear—they’ll be available to anyone who wants to know how Madrid’s outer districts really lived and developed.
