Sam Jones: From Che Guevara to lockdown: photo book tells story of Madrid
One warm June weekend 61 years ago, a scruffily bearded Argentinian on his way from Cuba to Cairo stopped over in Madrid. With almost a day to kill between flights, he did what any tourist of the time would have done: explored the city, visited a bullring, had breakfast and did a little shopping. He was, however, no ordinary tourist. A photograph taken very early that Sunday morning shows the unmistakable figure of Che Guevara standing in boots, beret and battle fatigues, one hand hooked over his belt and the other clutching a newspaper.
Che Guevara in Madrid, 1959. Photograph: César Lucas
The image, shot by a teenage photographer, is one of 160 pictures in a book chronicling the Spanish capital’s richly turbulent social, political and cultural history from 1900 to the present day. In its glossy pages, a Zeppelin flies over Gran Vía in 1930 – presaging the German and Italian warplanes that would darken Madrid’s skies later the same decade; the Beatles take a cigarette break before a concert at Las Ventas bullring; seven models sprint through the mushrooming suburbs of the 1970s, and the capital parties through the post-dictatorship cultural boom known as La Movida madrileña…
Julián Casanova - The Spanish Civil
War, 80 years after
Book
review: The Colour of Time - a pictorial history of global conflict
