Madrid: the old slaughterhouse of Legazpi

Now it is a Cultural Center, with numerous and attractive offers of ludic entertainment, which desperately seeks to attract the attention of both the citizens of Madrid, as well as all those who continually visit us.

But no matter how much you have tried to improve your image; no matter how attractive the cultural offer that tries to present the most extravagant or avant-garde of the moment, without forgetting the period or auteur cinema or even the magic of the theater, deep down, the atmosphere continues to be charged with that limbo of horror, that would have delighted teachers like Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King.

It is not difficult to resort to the whimsical world of comparisons, no matter how odious or tedious they may be, and see in the alignment of those old buildings, clones determined by the lack of transparency, the same layout as the barracks of a concentration camp, laboratories included, where, without having to resort to the prose that was in those in the cold gates of entry, it came to mean the same sentence as for the condemned who entered Dante's Inferno: forgetting all hope of coming out again.

The only difference, which is no consolation, of course, is that this field of horror was not made for human beings, but for the holocaust of animals: a place of mass sacrifice, which would supply meat to a population, Madrid, that never has stopped growing.

Cold and equal in their aseptic design, the only thing that varied in these buildings was the sign next to the entrance door that indicated the nature of the cattle to be slaughtered: cattle, sheep or pigs.

It was also at his side, where not a few stories and legends of vampirism were generated, located at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, when a miserable part of the population - and when I say miserable, I do it with great respect - crowded around to receive blood, especially from cattle, which not only served them as a vital means of subsistence - do you remember the famous phrase of Bram Stoker's Dracula, referring to that blood is life? - but also as a remedy to alleviate the effects of certain diseases, such as anemia.

As you can see, all cities have their secrets and their dark marginalities, not always contained in scrupulous history books, so many times, a simple look back is enough to realize all the sacrifices suffered by previous generations and see in a way, how lucky we are, even with the problems that may affect us today.

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