40,000 people

A friend who lives on a street near Plaza España tells me about the disaster. "When they have these macro-botellones, my street, which is narrow, a bit secluded, serves as a urinal for them. You can't imagine it."

I hadn't thought about it. 40,000 people on the street, drinking for hours. At some point, all of them would have wanted to relieve themselves. 40,000 people urinating. "You can't imagine the smell, the night we've had...", my friend says.

There will continue to be botellones. Our climate is warm, and buying a kit to prepare gin and tonics, as well as some bags of potato chips, from a nearby bazaar is good value. Now we complain, of course, about the botellones. As always, it's the dose that makes the poison. A botellón of 40,000 people attracts pickpockets, attracts drug dealers, can sellers... and leaves the adjacent streets full of urine. Excuse the crudeness, but that's how it is.

But there is an issue that we should not overlook. Nightlife was shut down due to the pandemic, and it seemed that nightlife entrepreneurs, as well as their workers, did not have as much right to earn a living as, for example, cultural entrepreneurs. "What you want is for your bars to open," they reproached us. And of course, yes. I love bars, I like them. And I like going to concerts, and having cocktails, and even, sometimes, I like going dancing and I like going to karaoke. But there have been pundits, people in positions of power, who have disparaged nightlife, as if those who own a nightclub or a music bar were outcasts, "peseteros" (we'll have to invent an equivalent word for euros), hedonists. As if it were fine for nightlife to cease to exist. Now, the same people who ---frivolously--- said that "everyone could go a few days without going to the disco" and that "we wouldn't die from not having a drink in a bar" complain about the disaster and ask for solutions. We will open the discos as before, but for many young people it is already too late. They have come of age like this: with the botellón in Plaza España.