Chueca

This guide to Chueca in Madrid opens on a July morning in 1998, when police vans arrived at this square and began confiscating cafe tables under a rule nobody had ever enforced here before. It traces the neighborhood's earlier decline in the 1970s, and its transformation after Franco's death as gay men and lesbians moved in, cheap rents drew new bars, and a bookstore opened with a rainbow flag in its window in 1993. Sit at one of the terraces spilling across the pavement here and picture the square before any of them existed.