In the darkness of Cañada Real: 15 months without electricity 20 minutes from the heart of Madrid
Fifteen years ago, Tamara settled in the last stretch of the 15 kilometers that Cañada Real runs through, a livestock route that has become the largest irregular settlement in Europe, at the gates of Madrid. “We made a shack and each month we improved it. Now I have a living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen”, narrates the young woman. For 15 months, however, electricity has been conspicuous by its absence. Appliances are dying, abandoned and orphaned from use. Through the faucets there is only nostalgia for the water. 
"We don't have drinking water and, without electricity, the 3,800 liters that the city council provides us every week cannot reach the house," explains Tamara, a Roma. On October 2, 2020, the light faded from the district in which she resides. The cut first affected sector 6, the most populous and extensive of those that make up Cañada Real. A week later, the interruption also hit sector 5, a more affluent area that extends to the other side of the A-3, parallel to the urbanizations of the municipality of Rivas-Vaciamadrid.
Two winters and a Filomena later, the supply has not been restored. In sector 6 - where the largest drug market in Europe is located along a kilometer and a half - electricity is a luxury for its more than 4,000 inhabitants, including 1,200 minors. In number five, the annexed district, however, the neighbors have managed to organize themselves and enjoy light on alternate days. “In reality, what has occurred is a limitation of the tension. Sector 6 is very complex electrically. In 5 we have only two transformation centers. We disconnected one of them and we got electricity for the other half”, recognizes Ángel García, a resident of the area where the cut has been more benign. 
It's early morning on a Sunday last December. Marketing is perceptible at kilometer zero of drug trafficking, in a section of sector 6 where cars crowd. “What do you want?” asks one of the vendors when the journalist appears along the route. “The administration blames drugs and marijuana plantations for the power outage, but they do not intervene to provide a solution. They have admitted to us that they know where he is, but they allege that the processes for a judge to authorize access to a home are very long. A justification that does not hold up, ”he laments.
«Plots were taken as in the west»
The urban geography of Cañada Real was born in the 1960s when cattle transit gave way to the appearance of small orchards and tool constructions on state-owned land. “The word spread, without documents involved, the first settlers took large plots and placed four sticks like in the west. And little by little it was leading to what we have now, for residential use”, evokes Ángel. “All the supplies we have are illegally connected, although the companies are aware. For six decades we have had free electricity and water. They have not been cut because there are some rights”.
Maria, sector 6
She is 60 years old and lives with her offspring in the most populated sector of Cañada Real, which runs from the intersection of Cañada with the A-3 to the Getafe municipal area. “My children and grandchildren have married here. I have my whole family here. I'm not going to lie to anyone but there have never been any problems here », she narrates. "Cañada Real has changed for the worse."
The most veteran of the place, like Pilar, have spent years demanding that meters be installed and the appropriate contracts be issued, a claim to which the Ombudsman joined last November. “We keep the written requests. There have been years of requests, but the response from the power company has always been the same: that the city council does not grant permission for the installation of the meters,” says the sixty-year-old, who lives on a plot that borders the Rivas apartment blocks.
“With Filomena we had a really bad time. This last year we have been able to mitigate it with some solar panels”, she admits. The lack of light is, remember those affected, a breach of the Regional Pact for the Cañada Real Galiana, signed in 2017 by the central government, the Community of Madrid, the affected municipalities and the political groups represented in the Assembly. In the document, the administrations undertook to guarantee the supply while a solution to the settlement was sought. 
A polyhedral reality
Throughout its 15-kilometre route, Cañada Real is a reality full of sharp edges. Its inhabitants rightly complain that it is reduced to the title of "the largest drug supermarket in Europe." A reality as true as crime, which, however, hides the diversity of a settlement where the exclusion and ghettos of the gypsy population and Maghreb origin coexist with the population of Spanish nationality, heirs of the first who took over the plots or that arrived later, by virtue of sales contracts signed in a kind of limbo. The diversity in Cañada Real appears even in the buildings: from simple shacks to houses with all imaginable equipment.
Based on firewood and solar panels
A few kilometers from Pilar's home, María faces the lack of light every day with remedies from another century. “We are dead in life”, she rants as she wanders through the room, presided over by a fireplace in which the last embers of a fire smoke. At nightfall, the room is also transformed into her family bedroom. “We take out the mattresses and we all sleep here. In the rest of the rooms you cannot stop”, warns the matriarch of a gypsy clan made up of “three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren”. “We shower with the water that we heat in a pot and we wash our clothes by hand on that stone. The washing machine is there without being used and all my bones already ache”.
Maria landed in Sector 6 more than two decades ago. “We need light and we want to pay. And whoever does not pay, then they cut it off with all of the law, ”she claims. Among the newcomers is Saida, a young woman who represents the population of Maghreb origin who has been finding refuge in the settlement. “A relative told me about Cañada, but I never imagined that a place like this could exist so close to the center of Madrid. I have four children. What is their fault for all this?” Saida wonders near the incinerator. 
When the cold gets worse, the lack of electricity becomes more pressing, like a pain that becomes more stabbing. “My children are the ones who are dealing with this the worst. The 13 and 15 year olds don't want to be here and, as soon as they can, they go with their aunt. Classmates make fun of them because they smell like smoke, but we have no other way to dry our clothes than over the fire,” Tamara stammers. Firewood is also not abundant among the hundreds of families that subsist in the dark, with numb muscles. “There are days when we don't have firewood. There is a boy who knows me at the dump and who sometimes lets me go for firewood. And if I don't go, I walk the streets looking for cabinets and anything that can be burned."
Hasan, sector 6
Hasan arrived a few years ago from his native Morocco. Today he is the father of a two-month-old baby, one of the youngest residents of Cañada Real and also more vulnerable to the lack of electricity. Hasan does not have a job and his situation in Spain is irregular. “Even if the light comes, we no longer have cables. The crane came to knock down some houses and also took the cable posts », he says.
Wood to heat homes has become such a precious commodity that in recent months solidarity initiatives have emerged that have paid for the shipment of firewood. “It is, together with the blankets, our way of fighting the cold. Here we apply what was done a century ago”, summarizes Ángel, a 28-year-old neighbor who earns a few quarters from the scrap metal business. "I have a son with bronchiolitis and asthma and it's so cold that every two or three times we're in the hospital," says one of the beneficiaries of a firewood distribution paid for by the residents of the Madrid town of Becerril de la Sierra.
“This is an exercise in solidarity, but the solution must be political. It is unsustainable that at this point there are families living in conditions like these. That they don't have electricity or water or the minimum health conditions when thousands of Christmas lights are being lit in Madrid", denounces Ángela Díez, councilor for United for Becerril, one of the organizations involved in a campaign that has provided assistance to fifty families. 
Angel, Sector 5
Ángel, an architect by profession, chose to settle in Cañada Real “of his own free will and not out of necessity”. "I recognize this as my neighborhood and we are currently fighting so that the regional pact can be fulfilled and as many homes as possible can be legalized," he says. “Legally nobody has papers here. I came about 14 years ago and I gave the person who occupied this plot some money, we made a signature on a napkin and it is what it is. I was aware when I bought this of the risk that the administration could come here at any time and tell me that I had to evacuate », he adds.
A future in shadows
A few meters away, Hasan, a young Moroccan, takes his turn picking up the portion of wood assigned to each family. “We have installed a stove and the situation has improved. I have a two-month-old girl and the doctor warns us to be careful with smoke”, he recalls. In the house that he shares with his wife and mother-in-law, the solar panels have installed a strict policy of energy rationing. “They are for the most basic. They are worth for some light bulbs and charge the mobile. The hardest thing is the cold. Being at home and the steam coming out of you, as if you were in the middle of the street. Sometimes it is better outside than inside the house, ”says Malika, the baby's grandmother.
The future looks bleak in the confines that Hasan and Ángel inhabit. "Here, even if the light is restored, it won't come because the cables have been removed," Ángel curses in front of some streetlights with no useful future. “We are paying just for sinners. All we want now is for them to give us a home and get out of here. This is inhumane”, replies Ángel. Rehousing is not, however, the option that everyone aspires to. “The immediate solution is for the power to return and then the next steps will be seen. Some people will want these relocations and others will prefer to stay here because it is our neighborhood and our identity”, says Houda.
“How long would it take to be able to rehouse 900 families? At the current rate, we calculate that it would end in 2070. Until then, will we be without power?” asks the neighborhood leader. “One of my children tries to comfort me. 'Mom, don't worry. When I'm a famous footballer I'll buy you a chalet and we'll get out of here,' she tells me. I just want to get out of Cañada,” Saida stammers, while her gaze wanders over the row of buildings that, like an endless line, extends beyond the horizon.
