Another shutter comes down in Spain
Spaniards are great at greetings. Today I’m about to see if they’re good at goodbyes.
It’s St Patrick’s Day and, for the pair enjoying one last round of beers on a café terrace just off Calle Real, this Sunday morning is still their Saturday night. As the bar they sit outside gears up for another busy afternoon, for another business in the vicinity it really is closing time.
With the lush green and the stone crosses and the clouds that usually deliver on their threats, tourists debarking cruise ships that lean against A Coruña’s marina often joke that the captain has docked in Ireland instead of Spain.
For more than a hundred years, the street kiosk on Avenida de la Marina has greeted those returning to firm ground. With rows of domestic newspapers and global magazines, fluorescent-coloured sticker albums and faded souvenirs, it makes for a fine photograph with the backdrop of A Coruña’s emblematic galerías, the white-framed, glassed-in balconies that allow sunlight in and keep everything else out. In The City of Glass, the elements hit hard.
As a steady stream of familiar faces stop by for a photo instead of a paper, today it’s the locals who are living like a tourist. Even for passersby who haven’t yet heard the news, the lingering embraces in front of piles of Marca and Hola seem more goodbye than good day. The tissues leave no further doubt.
Today, as loyal customers leave A Coruña’s most iconic street kiosk, there won’t be an ¡Hasta mañana!
Eulogy
It’s not the time to chat about my two-year-old daughter’s growing fondness for churros from the nearby Bonilla a la Vista or the city’s volatile winds that are capable of sending a few editions of the latest National Geographic magazine hurtling towards the harbour in an instant.
No, today Marta reaches over the counter with the card machine in one hand while dabbing her eyes with the other. She’s another eulogy away from another burst of tears.
It’s unsurprising. 24 years is a long time. And a lot of newspapers. Many of the children who once pestered their parents for a Pokemon magazine here now have families of their own.
Spain, too, has changed. It’s become older, more diverse. Four prime ministers - two from the socialist PSOE, two from the conservative Partido Popular - have governed since the turn of the millennium. During the same time across the Mediterranean, Italy has had 11 different leaders.
With the globalisation, digitalisation, and many other isations of the last 20 years, more and more comercios de todo la vida - the small businesses that have been around forever - have gradually, then suddenly disappeared.
“For a lifelong Coruñés, the galerías of A Coruña - the most iconic image of the city - cannot be understood without the Jamonería La Marina (restaurant), Heladería Colón (ice cream parlour), and the kiosk,” Laura García del Valle of La Voz de Galicia tells me. “The desolation felt by so many locals in the city is a reminder that big chains are incapable of replacing the soul of local businesses. Unfortunately, this seems to be something we only realise when the shutters are pulled down.”
With the kiosk owner retiring, Marta is pessimistic about her future. Spain’s jobs market is particularly hostile towards the middle-aged: one 2023 study estimated that 400,000 people over the age of 50 in Spain had been searching for work for more than two years. In Galicia, meanwhile, the over 45 make up 60% of the total unemployed figure for the region.
Having regained her composure - for now - Marta gives me a shiny new sticker album for my daughter.
I will have to buy the stickers somewhere else.
Nostalgic by nature
I'm not singing for the future
I'm not dreaming of the past
I'm not talking of the first times
I never think about the last
A rainy night in Soho, The Pogues
“Only a Martian wouldn’t understand the importance of a funeral in Galicia,” said an El País source following the Partido Popular’s fifth consecutive absolute majority in the recent regional elections in the northwest corner of Spain. The source could easily have been talking about my homeland.
“Galicia and Ireland have a historical fraternal relationship”, wrote Bieito Romera in his piece “Lá Fhéile Padraigh” (St Patrick’s Day in Irish) in La Voz de Galicia. Two lands with the trauma of mass emigration during the 19th and 20th centuries rooted in the collective psyche, nostalgia is our recreational drug of choice.
Today, however, the worst kind of morriña - the Galician term to describe longing for a land, a person, or a time in the past - hangs in the air: the kind that awaits with the same inevitability as the rising tide.
As with most of the people here to say goodbye to Marta, I can read the daily newspapers on my phone or tablet without leaving the house. Along with online subscriptions, I’ve always made sure to leave at least one reason to drop by the kiosk each day. It’s part of my routine. After all, life here is lived on the streets, in the barrio (neighbourhood). It’s why Spain always feels so alive.
And just like the market and bar, the kiosk is one of Spain’s great social hives that brings people together for quick hits of oxytocin. The seemingly innocuous tapas-sized daily interactions are the threads that form the fabric of community - and they help keep people healthy.
“On the day the Covid-19 lockdown was lifted I brought my two-year-old son out to go the kiosk by the marina,” Chiqui García, a local architect, tells me. “After crossing the city, there it was, on its own. That small shop full of newspapers and our favourite magazines. In some way, it meant that the city was still there, alive, among us. In the still lonely streets, that moment of community and interaction after months of confinement and solitude is something I’ll never forget.”
With most people living in compact flats in dense urban areas, these meeting places are hugely important for Spaniards. Thanks to the proximity that comes with density, I can dip in and out of these spots daily and get to know staff quickly. Within a couple of weeks, for example, I knew that Ireland and Japan were two destinations at the top of Marta’s bucket list. As I leave with the last copy of Marca that I will buy from this kiosk, I tell her to stop me on the street for travel tips when she gets around to booking her trip.
Gema García, owner of the nearby Café Cantante, is here now and, upon finding out that I am of Celtic stock, tells me that she recently read Angela’s Ashes and is a big fan of The Pogues.
“I’m going to be sad, upset,” Gema replies when I ask how she will feel once the shutters are drawn for the last time. “For me the kiosk represents many things: buying toys and magazines for my children, picking up the newspaper, the friendships with the women who work here. The people in this area, we’re like a family - we help and support each other. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.”
A few minutes later I find myself accepting Marta’s phone and a request to take a photograph of two long-time friends with a shared grá for Ireland outside a street kiosk.
Won’t see another one
A person might be gone, but his past remains. Where do all those heaps of personal past go? Does someone buy them, collect them, throw them away? Or does it drift like an old newspaper, blown by the wind along the street?
Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov
It’s hard to know how much longer Spain’s street kiosks will resist. The data suggests not long.
During the period 2012-2021, 44% pulled their shutters down for good. In Madrid, meanwhile, there were 800 kiosks in 2003 - 20 years later there were 300.
But there might be hope.
In May 2023, the association that represents kiosks in the Spanish capital (AVPPM) came together with Urban Service Point to launch a pilot program designed to help these businesses become more service-oriented. As a trial run, they fitted ten kiosks in Madrid with ATMs and Amazon Lockers. While the former is a new feature for kiosk workers, the latter isn’t - they have been minding neighbours’ spare keys and packages for years. Now they’ll be making a few bucks for doing so. Urban Service Point has helped reinvent more than 200 kiosks across Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, and Granada.
People can rightly argue that the digital age was always going to pose an existential threat for Spain’s street kiosks. But that doesn’t make their demise any less painful for the people of the barrio. Each one has a past, its own set of firsts, its own set of lasts. I cannot go back in time to buy my daughter her first packet of Liga Femenina stickers anywhere else. Hardly a destiny-defining detail, it is nonetheless now part of her history - it cannot be changed.
In the meantime, as lovers of Spain’s street kiosks, all we can do is use them before we lose them.
On this grey Galician Monday morning, the kiosk that I stand before will not suddenly spring into life. It will not unfurl its layers like a peacock to reveal a kaleidoscope of colours.
In La Ciudad de Cristal, with a very different kind of St Patrick’s Day hangover, today the glass feels a little more than half empty.