Madrid Walking Tours Shed Light On Hidden Black History

Madrid’s Black history tours are drafting increasing liking arsenic guides uncover an African heritage agelong overlooked successful Spanish textbooks and nationalist memory. The movement, highlighted coming by a Reuters report, is portion of a wider European push to admit assemblage legacies and nan effect of slavery on nationalist histories.

Tours uncover achromatic history “silenced” successful Spain’s acquisition system

As reported by Reuters, guideline Kwame Ondo, who launched Black history tours successful 2022, said he grew up successful Spain without ever seeing Black group represented successful his history books. “Obviously, erstwhile you commencement to research, you realise it’s a silenced history that’s been erased.”

Ondo’s family is from Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s erstwhile colony until independency successful 1968. His institution Afroiberica Tours now draws chiefly overseas visitors, peculiarly Black American travellers seeking links betwixt Madrid and nan wider African diaspora.

Historian Antumi Toasije, a professor astatine NYU’s Madrid campus, told Reuters location was an “absolute void” successful Spanish acquisition connected nan African presence, noting:
“It’s arsenic if location had ne'er been any… arsenic if it were thing caller that started successful nan 1980s aft Spain joined nan European Union.”

Another group, Madrid Negro, takes much of an activistic approach.
Co-coordinator Nieves Cisneros told Reuters:
“We can’t understand nan business improvement successful Catalonia aliases nan Basque Country without knowing that it comes from nan enslaved trade.”

During their tours, participants:

• Place commemorative stickers honouring forgotten Black residents
• Read Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”
• Light candles for Antonio Solis, a personnel of a historical brotherhood that paid ceremonial costs for impoverished Black Madrileños

For group personnel Irene Marine, who is of Haitian descent, nan tours transportation affectional weight.
“My Afro-descendant broadside is touched by this because it’s each very invisible… Why didn’t I cognize this aliases study it?”

Growing request for practice tourism

Travel operators are opening to return note.
Accessible Spain Travel promotes Ondo’s tour arsenic a chance to “uncover nan rich | tapestry of Black history woven into Madrid’s fabric” and highlights his characteristic successful El País for connecting pinch Black American visitors engaged pinch nan Black Lives Matter movement.

The agency describes nan acquisition arsenic a “captivating two-hour tour” exploring nan effect of slavery connected Madrid’s landmarks and spotlighting stories of Black communities “long earlier Christopher Columbus’s arrival.”

Both Afroiberica Tours and Madrid Negro scheme to grow their routes successful 2026, responding to rising liking from world visitors. The initiatives are expected to characteristic much neighbourhoods and incorporated archival investigation presently being compiled by historians and organization groups.

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