Richard Morley must be a very happy man. In today’s article on finding a home in Madrid, he relates how he may just have achieved the impossible!

“This room has everything you want”, the women said. Her husband, standing in the background nodded in agreement. They were not wrong. There was a fat desk, a hugely oppressive dark walnut wardrobe, a high bookcase with bowed shelves showing years of use, a Lloyd loom wicker chair taking up twice as much space as something more utilitarian and a bedside table that looked as if the mere weight of an alarm clock would cause it to collapse. The latter stood next to the lower half of the narrowest pair of bunk beds I have ever seen. My first thought was that I was to share this room, ¡que horror!, but I was assured that was not the case. So why bunk beds? Yes the room had everything. The amazing thing was that “everything” was contained in a room that measured barely four by two metres.

The room had been advertised on Loquo Madrid and I was now in the business of searching for accommodation. The ascent to its fifth floor location in an elevator that was not sufficiently ample to contain both me and my suitcase together should have given me due warning. But after seeing the room, my fears were well grounded by the twenty meter obstacle course to the (shared) bathroom and the two square metre kitchen that I would have to share with three other tenants.

There are a number of websites that prospective tenants can use to find rented accommodation in Madrid:, Idealista.com, Sublet.com, and Loquo. All contain plenty of properties, but do not guarantee suitability or quality. Beware also of those that do not mention size. After a while it dawned on me that a suitable piece of equipment would have been a cat for swinging. Many would have failed the test.

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Google has just released a new mapping feature that I’ve been waiting for for ages, and is going to work really well on this blog. You can now embed their maps in the same way as you can add youtube videos to blogs, with a simple snippet of code. Here is my map of some great bars in the La Latina area of Madrid. Click on the blue flags for more details, use the controls to zoom in, out etc, click and hold to drag the map around… great stuff:

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Richard Morley posts from Madrid about a problem that currently seems to be out of control in the Spanish capital:

There’s this scrawny guy who crouches most days in the Calle de Arenal, one of Madrids streets thronged with tourists as they move from Sol to the Palacio Real. Apart from looking somewhat emaciated, he seems in reasonable health, in late teens or early twenties, is well dressed and occasionally can be seen smoking a cigarette. Yet all day he crouches, staring at the ground. One leg is bent under him, the other bares the weight of his right arm stretched out with the hand semi clasped like a claw, but open enough to form a cup into which passers-by are silently beseeched to drop a few coins. Unlike the other human statues that seems to plague Madrid; those street “performance artists” who dressed as miners, ballerinas, cowboys or caked in mud, pose unmoving until an impressed observer throws a coin into the provided receptacle, this scrawny young man does nothing, not even a murmured “gracias” for the few one or two Euro coins that the sympathetic feel obliged to give him.

On Saturdays, when the shopping crowds throng the Calle de Preciados, a main shopping thoroughfare that connects the Gran Via to the Puerta del Sol and bounded by richly stocked department stores, the pedestrians passage is often blocked by supplicants kneeling and bent like Moslems praying to Mecca. These people moan and cry out for help, often beseeching God’s assistance, but what they really want are the shoppers to throw unwanted change into the cardboard box, cap or a paper cup from McDonalds resting before them on the paving slabs. The sight disgusts a Spanish friend who accuses them of duping the public with their piety and claims they make a small fortune from the compassionate crowd.

This month of August, deserted by vacationing Spaniards, but full of tourists, seems to be a popular time for beggars to ply their supposed plight and appeal for alms. It is almost impossible to walk Madrid’s streets without being pestered. Even the diner or person minding his own business in a café is not safe. The beggars approach tables seeking cigarettes or money. To one seeking a cigarette I pointed to a vending machine not five metres away. I received a torrent of abuse for my helpfulness and she moved on to other tables. A man approached me apparently selling lottery tickets. In Spain this is a job given to the blind and disabled, so one is naturally sympathetic, but this one appeared neither blind nor suffering any other handicap. When I told him I did not want a ticket, he quite rudely demanded I gave him money for food. I declined.

Quite frankly, estoy hasta el pelo with these people. I want to walk and sightsee unmolested. I have heard voiced similar complaints about these people from elderly British and American visitors. The beggars can be quite demanding and these people feel threatened. It is not a good memory to take from what is one of the most beautiful and friendly cities in Europe and does not present Madrid, and by extension, Spain, in a good light.

In the Plaza de Callao most days, a small South American woman with severely truncated arms, I presume from being born to a mother who took thalidomide while pregnant, spreads out a blanket on the pavement and in the searing heat of an unforgiving sun, asks for financial help. At the other end of the Calle de Preciados, in Sol, a youngish man with no arms at all holds and rattles a plastic cup in his mouth and appeals for money “para el amor de dios”. And while it is remarkable that he can voice this appeal while holding the increasingly heavy cup between his teeth, he is always well groomed, well nourished, clean and polite, which surely means that, with his appalling handicap, this man has someone who feeds him, dresses him, and cares for him in many ways. So why does he feel the need to appeal to the crowds of Sol for money? So many visitors must go away thinking that rich, resourceful Spain does not care for its less able population.

Yet we know this not to be true. Daily the local news on TV invariably will carry an item of how communities or charities are extending their help to the less well off members of this society. Of course, there are people who slip through the net. Like capital cities across the globe, Madrid has its share of rough sleepers blocking alleys and shop doorways with their makeshift cardboard “homes”. The numbers of poor legal and illegal immigrants are a huge drain on the community’s resources, but I have also been approached, two evenings running, by an obviously absent minded American youth who claimed his passport and wallet had been stolen and he just needed a “couple of euros” for him to use a photo booth so he could get a new passport. Then there was the purported Swiss businessman who claimed he had been mugged and wanted “to borrow” some money for a hotel room!

Although I can’t write this without remembering a band of happily inebriated beggars who used to occupy a few slabs of pavement near Sol metro station and then moved on to Callao. They would huddle on their cardboard surrounded by hand-written signs soliciting financial donations “por cerveza”, “por ron” and “por whisky”. They were always laughing and having a joke with the passing crowd. Any tourist amused enough to want to take a photo of this carefree bunch would suddenly see through his view-finder one of the men holding aloft a sign that bore the legend, “Fotos – 2 euros”. Unfortunately, other members of their ilk are not so amicable.

Wherever you look in Madrid, the “honest unemployed” are setting themselves up with an act to appeal for the tourist euro. The city is awash with musicians, performance artists, jugglers and other street entertainers. In several cases it would seem that “talent” is a minimal requirement, but at least they are giving something in return for whatever few coins they receive. But the beggars are just a pain.

This is something the authorities need to address urgently. The beggars seem to operate unmolested by the police, unless a café calls them in specifically. For me they represent a more unpleasant face than the pick-pockets of the Rastro. At least that’s an “honest” crime that does not seek to exploit the good nature of a sympathetic, but ultimately deceived public.