How a Pair of Game-Changing Mayors Could Transform Madrid and Barcelona

A golf course is an unlikely place to start a revolution. Nonetheless, that’s where the opening shots of a new battle for Spain’s cities have just been fired. Madrid’s Club de Campo Villa de Madrid is arguably Spain’s most exclusive country club, a high-society meeting place on the city fringe where the King’s sister is known to stable a few of her horses. Now, Madrid’s probable soon-to-be new mayor, left-winger Manuela Carmena, wants to tear down the fence surrounding the club and let the public in. If Carmena gets her way, the club’s two swimming pools would become accessible to the public, its restaurants would be converted into a hospitality academy, and the golf courses would take on new life as a farm school. To the club’s regulars, this assault on their second home is nothing short of a declaration of class war–newspaper El Mundo quotes one regular swearing: “I won’t go back to Prada. One of the managers told me he was voting Carmena”.

The move is just one of a large number of controversial plans being proposed by the two women poised to become the mayors of Madrid and Barcelona. These left-wing leaders, Madrid’s Carmena and Barcelona’s Ada Colau, are giving urban policy a firm shake-up. In targeting wealthy preserves like the Club De Campo, they’re also trying to make it clear to Spain’s traditional elite that they no longer call the shots.