✈️ Madrid (Not Your Typical Guide)
Street Art, Local Gems & No Touristy Fluff.
👋 Ciao, I’m Giulia Blocal, your street art insider. This is Beyond the Postcards, the travel side of Beyond the Walls, my long-running newsletter on street art, graffiti, off-the-beaten-path travel, and a bit of my life in between.
Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).
After Lisbon, Athens, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Naples, this month we land in Madrid 🇪🇸, the city I once called home.
From the tags of Muelle and the local movement of flecheros who began marking the streets of Madrid in the 1980s, the city has evolved alongside the art on its walls, gradually becoming one of Europe’s most important capitals for urban art. Less polished and less tourist oriented than Barcelona, Madrid still preserves neighbourhoods where street art feels raw, spontaneous and deeply connected to everyday life. Pair that with one of the liveliest contemporary art scenes in Europe, thriving inside former factories, railway workshops and unconventional cultural spaces, and the result is one of the most exciting cities on the continent for anyone interested in urban creativity.
I lived in Madrid in the early 2000s, when the street art scene was just beginning to flourish and the city felt very different from today. Since then I have kept returning regularly (once even together with readers of this newsletter 🥰), watching the city change without entirely losing its character, something that cannot easily be said about many European capitals. What still strikes me is how healthy and restless the artistic scene remains: galleries continue opening in basements on the outskirts, artists still work illegally in the streets, and museums and independent spaces keep pushing beyond the mainstream rather than simply trying to please it.
So, let’s wander through the streets of Madrid together.
Vámonos.
🇪🇸 In this Madrid mini-guide you will find:
Madrid’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods;
My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries;
Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss;
Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals;
My Interactive Madrid Map;
Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Madrid Mood.
Madrid’s Best Street Art Neighborhoods:
