Almeida reaches deal to move Bernabeu shows as neighbours call it ‘patch’ | Madrid News
This Tuesday, WhatsApp groups of residents around the Santiago Bernabéu stadium are furious. The media has revealed that the Madrid City Council and Real Madrid have agreed to force the organizers of macro concerts to end at 11 p.m. The two institutions have also agreed on other measures, such as increasing the entry times to the premises and increasing cleaning. This is not the response that residents expected to the complaints they have made public since May, when the stadium hosted Taylor Swift’s first big show. “It’s a patch, and people feel like they are laughing at us,” says José Manuel Paredes, a resident of the area and a spokesman for one of the associations fighting against the new Bernabéu project.
The council announced this agreement on the day of the last of four performances that the Colombian singer Karol G gave in Madrid, which filled the stadium area with thousands of the artist’s followers. This situation has increased the level of protests from residents, who denounce the fact that their area has been transformed into a public urinal, that it is very difficult to walk in the crowd and that the noise and vibration levels have increased after four days of concerts with their respective essays. Until September, the stadium will no longer host macro concerts. On the 7th and 8th, I will have the Aventura bachata.
The council said the measures would remain in place “until the club has implemented all the measures in the noise control plan.” A few weeks ago, Real Madrid said it was working on installing soundproof curtains that would cover the entire upper corridor of the stadium, which is outdoors.
“We don’t want time to go forward, and we don’t want to put things in order, what’s being done at these concerts is in many ways beyond all legal limits, they’re being done in an unprepared place and for something that doesn’t have a license,” Paredes’ verdict. The goal of the neighborhood association that emerged after the opening of the Bernabéu as the epicentre of mass entertainment in Madrid is one and very clear: to abandon this business model and stop mass concerts. “If you change the end time, you’ll have to change the start time, which will coincide with school departures and extracurricular activities. There’s a school in this neighborhood with 2,000 students. So they’re trying to solve one problem by creating another,” says a representative of the neighborhood.
The city council also indicates that “priority parking measures will be established for residents on public roads, and for residents on Rafael Salgado Street, this will be facilitated by converting blue spaces into green spaces.” According to the municipality, more spaces will also be allocated to residents and stricter controls will be put in place for alcohol consumption on public roads.
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The announcement is the latest attempt by the municipal authorities to calm the mood of the Bernabéu residents. At the end of June, Mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida assured that macro concerts at the stadium would be limited to 20 per year. “It’s all improvisation,” says Paredes, the representative of the association, whose 1,000 residents live in the area.
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