Toledo shines. Its streets are filled with dazzling lights. Tourists pass through the historic center. They look up, stop walking, take photos, share on the networks. Everything seems perfect. Everything seems safe. Everything seems friendly. But down below, in the portals and arcades, … On the bridges and in the streets there are those who have nowhere to spend the night. Those who cannot keep warm, eat or access the most basic things.
The call The most beautiful heritage Christmas in the world It works like a story: it’s attractive, seductive, viralizable. The problem is that it also serves as an alibi: while walking through its illuminated streets, We don’t know that poverty cannot be turned off with a light bulb.. This exclusion does not disappear between colored lights. Homelessness and structural poverty are still there, visible to those who really look.
The Foessa 2025 report from Castile-La Mancha confirms this: poverty is becoming chronic, severe exclusion is increasing and employment no longer protects. Entire families live in situations of extreme vulnerability. People who work are still poor. Young people without possibilities of emancipation. Older people supporting households with insufficient pensions. And people who have lost everything except the street. It’s not temporary. It’s not a bad sequence. It’s structural.
Added to this reality is aporophobia, the rejection of the poor because they are poor. Society tolerates the existence of poverty, but makes it invisible, ignoring it, repressing it as an urban postcard. Poverty in the abstract does not bother us. Annoying when it interrupts the perfect narrative of the city. When you demand policies and rights. When it becomes clear that aesthetics and brilliance are not the same thing as social justice.
Homeless in Toledo. People sleeping on the Salto del Caballo footbridge
These are not charitable or symbolic gestures. This is public policy. Sufficient social housing. A decent job. Stable social services throughout the year. Mental health and comprehensive support. Recognize that the right to live with dignity cannot depend on the season or the festive calendar.
“Society tolerates the existence of poverty, but makes it invisible, ignores it, represses it as an urban postcard”
Toledo invests millions in lighting and promotion. But it fails on the essential: guaranteeing that no one is excluded from the right to housing, to a minimum income, to decent living conditions. While the city admires itself, too many people remain left behind. Lights do not solve inequalities. They don’t change the structures. They do not protect rights.
The question is clear, uncomfortable and urgent: what city are we building when we allow poverty to become part of the urban landscape? What priorities do we have when the postcard is more important than people’s lives?
A city is not measured by how much it shines. It is measured by the one it protects. And today, in Toledo, too many people continue to live in the dark.
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