Anyone who comes to the Lavapiés neighborhood in Madrid, cannot help but notice its feature that is most noticeable: graffiti art is everywhere. As we see in our free graffiti tour in Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid, every shutter of a shop, wall, stockade, light pole, square or building – has become an endless urban canvas for graffiti artists from all over the world.
On our recommended free graffiti tour of the Lavapiés neighborhood in Madrid we see dozens of types of graffiti and street art. Graffiti has changed from the 1970s in the United States to the present day all over the world from means of communication between gangs to means of protest, self-expression or art for the sake of art.
What makes our free street art tour so special?
The free tour of the Lavapiés neighborhood, near the neighborhoods of Embajadores and La Latina, passes by different types of graffiti, which well reflect the essence of graffiti in general, and its use and meaning in the city of Madrid.
There are places in the world where on graffiti tours, most of the time focusing on the graffiti itself, forget the fact that the graffiti is not there by chance, and it is just another face – beautiful and touching as it may be – of the neighborhood, of the streets, of the people.
This is not the case in the Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid: our free graffiti tour of Lavapiés, Madrid, is actually used for exactly this purpose: it helps you, the tourists, to be exposed to the stories behind the paintings, to the people behind the walls, to the streets behind the artists.
One of the most beautiful examples of this is the work of the artist Ampparito, as part of the annual project of graffiti paintings on the outer walls of the Tabacalera, alongside which we pass as part of our free graffiti tour of Lavapiés in Madrid. The Tabacalera, the ancient tobacco factory that has become the home of street artists and their creativity in the last century, invites artists from all over the world every few years to decorate its exterior walls with fabulous graffiti paintings.
Ampparito's choice is fascinating in this regard: while graffiti has become more and more institutionalized over the years, which can obscure the context in which graffiti is located – we received a reminder from Ampparito not to forget that behind the paintings, there is also a street, that actually was there before the graffiti, and probably (and hopefully) will last longer...
In our free tour in Lavapiés Madrid we respect the neighborhood and the street art!
Our free graffiti tour in Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid follows Ampparito and the other artists who chose Lavapiés as the central point of their creations. We go through dozens of spectacular pieces of art, of all types and sizes. But for a moment we do not forget that every painting is also a story of a neighborhood, a story of a street, a story of a person.
Want to discover more local Secretos?
Join us for one of the Free Graffiti Tours in Madrid and learn much more about the history of the neighborhood and its graffiti, the main artists, the local-international food and of course the graffiti istelf :-)
(photos: https://www.murostabacalera.com/ampparito)