A capsule hostel will erase the former Baobab, Senegalese icon of Lavapiés, from the map

Regarding the abandoned building in which Baobab and the Prinoy pension operated, located on the upper floor and which also closed its doors during the pandemic, neighbors have already detected the movement of workers removing the rare furniture remaining inside the old restaurant. The works will thoroughly reform numbers 1 and 3 of Cabestreros Street, as well as the ground floor of number 5 of this street. All located in the heart of Nelson Mandela Square.

According to the company responsible for the complete renovation of this building on its website, Urbex Arquitectura – which has 17 projects in the capital – the work includes the expansion of a former hotel and restaurant space “with a new hotel concept”, which will feature “large shared rooms which will house bunk beds in separate cabins”. That is to say a capsule hostel, there are already a dozen in Madrid.

The building consists of a ground floor with an independent premises, where a restaurant will be installed, and common areas for hotel use which include a cafeteria-breakfast room, a reception and pedestrian access opening onto a landscaped interior patio. This same patio will communicate with the premises of number 5 of the aforementioned street, a space which will house the beds of this hotel. There will be the same from the first to the fourth floor of the building, as well as a secondary part of the attic, which will free up the roof to serve as a large viewpoint terrace which will have a spa area and a swimming pool.

The building aims to “resolve and improve” one of the corners of Nelson Mandela Square. Thus, this project “of a more contemporary nature” aims to respect the elements of the environment of this area of ​​the neighborhood, to act “in line with the current design” of this space, by revitalizing an abandoned and obsolete building.

Today, Daniel, a Cuban citizen who emigrated 26 years ago and settled in Lavapiés, is pleased that finally the company that requested to reform the space obtained the necessary licenses, without “succumbing to protests and attacks of entrepreneurial work.” In fact, several posters with the face of the owner of Urbex, the architect Javier González Herráez, distributed on public roads, designated him as an “enemy of Lavapiés”. In addition to the project that will see the light of day in the coming years, this architectural firm has also promoted other urban projects in this central area, including the Ibis hotel on Valencia Street, in Lavapiés Square.

Such work, insists this neighbor, could promote regeneration of the neighborhood, which has become increasingly complicated in recent months. In fact, Nelson Mandela Square, as this newspaper has already reported, is one of three places in this neighborhood – with Jacinto Benavente and Tirso de Molina – open-air rooms for the homeless, who find a place to plant their mattresses or cardboard on benches, nooks or crannies in the cement.

In fact, explains the president of the neighborhood association La Corrala de Lavapiés, Manolo Osuna, with the rehabilitation of Tirso de Molina, many homeless people have settled in this square in Lavapiés, where “those who sell drugs and those who use them” live alongside them, being “clear that it is a complicated place at night” and that residents try to avoid whenever they can. But this is not the only point in the neighborhood where residents are wary of possible thefts or insults. The squares of Lavapiés and Arturo Barea also make up this list of places that it is not recommended to visit at certain times of the day.

There is another part of the social fabric of the neighborhood that criticizes the completion of this work, calling it an encouragement to “speculation” in a “gentrified” neighborhood. “There was already a guest house there that offered this service to new neighbors and tourists, but the owner decided to sell the building in 2020,” Osuna points out to the newspaper.

Riots in 2018

Thus, once the demolition work begins, only this space will remain in memory which, in addition to a Senegalese restaurant active for more than a decade, was the scene of one of the most tense moments experienced in this district of the capital. “They were very tense days here. The left encouraged confrontation and the people in the neighborhood were very afraid,” Daniel tells this newspaper. The death of the Senegalese mantero from a heart attack in 2018 after a race he had undertaken to escape the municipal police generated disorder in these streets of Madrid for a few days that neighbors remember with lumps in their throats.

It is a violent situation that reached its climax with the visit of the Senegalese consul in Spain to Lavapiés and after an attempted lynching he had to hide in the now closed restaurant located in Nelson Mandela Square. The demonstrators, armed with stones and branches torn from trees, tried to attack Mouctar Belal Ba, who had taken refuge in this space until the CRS of the National Police managed to evacuate this diplomat with the entourage who accompanied him. As this newspaper reported at the time, the Senegalese organized to denounce this situation criticized him for not responding to their calls to plan the day’s demonstrations.

“Everything was quite dangerous, they threw the chairs from the terrace and we had to take refuge inside the bar,” the president of the La Corrala neighborhood association, who accompanied the political representatives at the time, told the newspaper. “It was clear that it was not people from the neighborhood who were involved in this story,” he emphasizes. It should be remembered that the founder of Podemos, Juan Carlos Monedero, was one of the demonstrators that day.