The new wave of gentrification and tourism threatens bookstores: “The owners do not care about the social content of the businesses” | Culture | EUROtoday

It could be very celebrated that the bodily guide, the one you contact and scent, has not been displaced by the digital format (as, alas, occurred to the poor data…). But the bodily guide weighs quite a bit and takes up a number of house, and that house the place books are saved, displayed and offered (they’re known as bookstores) more and more requires better funding, as a result of fixed rise in actual property costs, typically related to processes of gentrification and tourism. The physiognomy of cities is altering (some say that town, as we all know it, is being destroyed) and a few bookstores are being overwhelmed by the curler of this hypothetical success city.

The Tipos Infames bookstore, situated within the coronary heart of Madrid’s Malasaña neighborhood and the epicenter of an intense cultural life, has been the final to announce its finish, an announcement that this week fell like a thermonuclear bomb on the editorial circuits and readers. “Gentrification forces us to close,” Alfonso Tordesillas, one of many three companions, together with Gonzalo Queipo and Curro Llorca (now editor at Las Afueras), who based the now legendary bookstore 15 years in the past, mentioned in a video for social networks. Curiously, cultural areas corresponding to bookstores, different theaters or artwork galleries had been identified as an expression of the gentrification of neighborhoods when, round 2010, this phenomenon started to worsen in Spain and have become the topic of public debate and robust tutorial examine.

Over time, huge touristification processes could be added, maybe much more aggressive on the subject of expelling the neighborhood, working city adjustments and acquiring profitability from locations of coexistence. And a few of the aforementioned cultural companies are additionally starting to be expelled. “The Malasaña neighborhood was very different 15 years ago than it is today, although there were already hipsters. Gentrification is a process that affects many businesses, not just cultural ones, and that turns a neighborhood into a hostile place for many. Up to this point we have been able to defend ourselves,” says bookseller Gonzalo Queipo, experiences Andrea Aguilar.

“In these cases we could talk about waves of gentrification,” explains sociologist Daniel Sorando, creator, along with Álvaro Ardura, of the essay First we take Manhattan. The artistic destruction of cities (Cataract). The “pioneers” are bookstores, different theaters or artwork galleries that accompany new neighbors with liberal or artistic professions on their arrival to historically common and even stigmatized neighborhoods (and, very importantly, with low costs). Some specialists, corresponding to Richard Florida, applauded the emergence of artistic citiesas a mode of financial improvement and concrete regeneration… though years later, in view of the expansion of inequality and expulsion, Florida retracted its preliminary optimism.

These processes, along with elevating costs (each of land and glowing water), have subsequently favored, with the layer of touristification added, the looks of companies extra linked to tourism than to tradition (trendy cafes, bakeries and specialty espresso, or memento outlets) and all sorts of franchises. “With the integration of these neighborhoods into the commercial, economic and symbolic dynamics, their value increases, and they no longer only attract poets and artists: they are beginning to be places for tourism and other types of profiles that not only have cultural but also economic capital,” says Sorando.

Thus, costs rise increasingly, particularly when there isn’t a regulation for rents, and the companies that proliferate are people who produce better profitability and pays a better lease. Some bookstores are going through closure, corresponding to Tipos Infames or Caótica, in Seville. Others, corresponding to Desperate Literature and Central de Callao, each in Madrid, are pressured to alter places, as additionally occurred to 80 Mundos in Alicante. Some, like Traficantes de Sueños in Madrid or El Lokal in Barcelona, ​​take motion and purchase the property. And, watch out, some new bookstores open their doorways and take a look at their luck, even in central and tense neighborhoods: that is the case of Madrid’s Parenthesis, in Lavapiés, or Verbena, La Latina.

As if that weren’t sufficient, the stress on bookstores is elevated by distance promoting on platforms corresponding to Amazon and competitors with massive chains. “With the profit margins they provide, bookstores cannot afford the rent increases that are occurring due to the wave of real estate speculation, which sometimes amounts to up to double the price,” says Álvaro Manso, spokesperson for the Spanish Confederation of Guilds and Associations of Booksellers (CEGAL, which brings collectively greater than 1,100 bookstores in Spain) and bookseller at Luz y vida, in Burgos. At CEGAL they work to gather and supply info on the obtainable help and in order that impartial bookstores that generate exercise of their atmosphere and are a spotlight of cultural life have a singular characterization earlier than the administration that permits them, for instance, to get pleasure from tax benefits or rental help. “The disappearance of bookstores creates a cultural vacuum in the neighborhoods that is not replaced,” says Manso.

Fewer and fewer books are bought in conventional bookstores: 4% lower than final 12 months, which represents the identical lower that occurred between 2017 and 2024, in accordance with the Barometer of Reading and Book Purchasing Habits in Spain in 2025offered this week. Large chains, then again, grew by 3%. A bookstore, moreover, loses a part of its that means when neighbors are expelled from the neighborhood, as is so steadily seen right now. “Bookstores or galleries are not responsible for gentrification,” Sorando concludes, “they are a stage in a broader process whose main responsibility falls on the owners who modulate the tone of the neighborhood according to their ambitions for profitability, without caring about the social content of the businesses.”

Buy, renew or die

The combative Traficantes de Sueños bookstore, additionally an intense essential and cultural house, in Madrid, felt the sword of Damocles on its head in 2024, when the property determined to promote the constructing resulting from having to face costly structural works. “Our street [cerca de la plaza de Tirso de Molina, en Madrid] “It is very greedy for hotels and the tourist economy,” says Beatriz García, a member of the collective. So they decided to take the bull by the horns, to go from resistance to direct action against gentrification. That is to say: to buy the building.

With the work included, the operation amounted to one and a half million euros, which was financed by the ethical financial services cooperative Coop57, with the contribution of the workers and with the support of its large community, which put some 150,000 euros in donations and interest-free loans. It is a project that also includes the other tenants, the Senda de Cares and Red Interlavapiés associations. “Now we are owners,” says García, “we have to pay the debt for 20 years.” An identical transfer is what managed to avoid wasting the El Lokal bookstore, linked to counterculture, self-management and libertarianism, after 37 years within the Barcelona neighborhood of El Raval, and after the contract expired on January 1, 2025 and it was put up on the market. It was additionally achieved with the assist of Coop57 and its grassroots neighborhood.

There are those that search for different alternate options. The 80 Mundos bookstore in Alicante, opened in 1973, needed to shut its historic headquarters final summer season, though it managed to return within the fall in what was the house of the Pynchon & Co bookstore. “It has been a happy ending for the bookstore, but not for the city: they gave us a kick to build a tourist apartment building,” says accomplice Carmen Juan. The case obtained large media consideration within the metropolis and brought about stress that, in accordance with the bookseller, brought about the City Council (PP) to place a two-year moratorium on licenses for change of use to vacationer residences. After a lot “panic” and uncertainty, the bookstores obtained the supply from the Pynchon bookstore.

“They wanted to cease their activity, but, as owners of the premises, they did not want to contribute to gentrification, they did not want it to become a hostile space for citizens, but rather a neighborhood and cultural space,” says Juan. The resolution was optimum, as a result of the premises had been already arrange as a bookstore they usually may keep the cafeteria. It’s curious, and good: the present 80 Mundos bookstores had began, and had met, working at Pynchon, whose spirit additionally they wish to protect. “I am quite devastated by the news about Tipos Infames. It has been a reference for the construction of many independent bookstores,” says Juan. The La Central de Callao bookstore, which occupied an unimaginable mansion within the coronary heart of Madrid, needed to depart it in opposition to its will and occupy a smaller house proper in entrance. The well-known Sant Jordi bookstore, within the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, ​​additionally managed to reopen final December with sure changes: including a small restaurant within the again room and a calendar of occasions to enliven the lifetime of this historic place. Now you’ll be able to have vermouth and tapas.

Many occasions the ending is extra abrupt, as appears within the introduced closure of Infamous Types. Although, in a wierd twist of the script that the web produces, the star chef José Andrés, on social networks, has provided to avoid wasting her…