Walking Tours Unearth Madrid's Overlooked African Heritage

MADRID — Beneath the grand plazas, centuries-old churches, and elegant boulevards that define Madrid’s image, a quieter story of resilience and forgotten legacy is beginning to surface. A new wave of cultural walking tours is rewriting the city’s historical map, illuminating the long-overlooked African presence in the Spanish capital and reshaping how residents and visitors understand its past.

Rediscovering a Silenced History

While tourists traditionally flock to the Royal Palace or the Prado Museum, these new tours guide participants through lesser-known corners of old Madrid. Hidden behind ornate façades and cobblestoned alleys lie traces of the city’s deep entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade — and with the communities shaped by it.

Afroiberica Tours, founded in 2022 by guide and researcher Kwame Ondo, has become a cornerstone of this growing movement. Ondo, the Spanish-born son of parents from Equatorial Guinea, began organizing his tours after realizing how little of Spain’s African history appeared in mainstream education. For him, the walks offer an act of recovery — a way to reclaim stories effaced from the nation’s collective memory.

Standing before the Church of San Ginés, one of Madrid’s oldest parishes, Ondo gestures to a faint emblem etched into the stonework. Few passing tourists notice it, but he explains that the church once hosted a brotherhood established by free and enslaved Black residents, who pooled resources to bury their dead with dignity when society denied them that right. His audience, clustered tightly around him, listens as he narrates names, dates, and forgotten rituals that once animated these streets.

“This part of our history isn’t in Spanish textbooks or museums,” Ondo tells his group. “But without it, you cannot understand who we are today.”

Academic Perspectives and the Void in Education

The absence of Africa’s story in Spanish historiography has puzzled and frustrated scholars for decades. Historian Antumi Toasije, a professor at New York University’s Madrid campus, calls it “an absolute void.” He notes that although people of African descent lived in Spain for centuries — from enslaved laborers in royal households to sailors in imperial fleets — their contributions were deliberately erased from national narratives.

“The modern idea is that Black presence in Spain began in the late 20th century, with postcolonial immigration from North and West Africa,” Toasije explains, pausing before a statue of King Charles III. “That distortion hides centuries of coexistence, conflict, and exchange.”

Spain’s ties to Africa stretch back long before the colonial scramble of the 19th century. The Iberian Peninsula’s southern coast traded with North African kingdoms for millennia, while during the height of the Spanish Empire, enslaved Africans were shipped through ports like Seville and Cádiz to work in domestic service, agriculture, and crafts across Spain and its overseas colonies. Even Madrid, a city far from the sea, hosted slave auctions and homes of wealthy merchants who owned enslaved servants.

Grassroots Voices and Activist Heritage Tours

Beyond academic circles, grassroots collectives have transformed this research into action. The group Madrid Negro organizes what it calls “memory walks” — guided routes that double as tributes to the lives and legacies of Africans and Afro-descendants who shaped the city's fabric.

For collective member Nieves Cisneros, the tours serve a dual purpose: educating the public and confronting the moral foundations of Spain’s wealth. “We can’t understand Spain’s modernization, or the industrial boom of regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country, without acknowledging that it was built on centuries of colonial and slave-based exploitation,” Cisneros says.

On a recent afternoon, participants in one of Madrid Negro’s tours paused before a crumbling 19th-century façade near Plaza de la Cebada. They affixed rose-shaped stickers to the wall, each bearing the name of an Afro-descendant activist from Spain’s past — figures like Antonio Solís, who organized funeral assistance societies for Black residents in the 1800s. The group then read poetry beneath the sunlit balconies, transforming a quiet alley into a space of remembrance.

For Irene Marine, a participant of Haitian descent, the experience was transformative. “As someone who’s both Afro-descendant and Madrileña, it feels like discovering a hidden chapter of myself. Why didn’t I learn this in school?” she asks. “We were taught about Columbus, kings, and explorers, but never about the people who built those worlds yet disappeared from their stories.”

Cultural Context and Comparative Perspectives

Spain’s delayed reckoning with its African heritage contrasts sharply with trends in neighboring countries. In Portugal, the government has funded research and memorial projects acknowledging Lisbon’s role in the slave trade, including the forthcoming Memorial to Enslaved People. France, too, has faced public debates and museum exhibitions about its colonial legacy. In the United Kingdom, universities and municipalities have begun to audit how wealth from slavery shaped public institutions.

In Spain, by contrast, formal recognition remains limited. There is no national museum or dedicated monument commemorating the nation’s participation in slavery or its Afro-descendant communities. Although awareness is increasing — particularly since the global racial justice movements of 2020 — institutional responses remain tentative.

Scholars suggest that this reluctance stems partly from Spain’s complex colonial history, which also involves the Americas, the Philippines, and Equatorial Guinea. Acknowledging the African dimension, they argue, challenges long-held myths of Spain as a nation that “lost an empire” rather than one that benefited from coerced labor and extraction.

Economic and Social Implications

The rising popularity of these tours offers more than symbolic recognition; it also holds economic promise for the local tourism industry. Madrid, already one of Europe’s leading city destinations, has seen a post-pandemic surge in travelers seeking “authentic,” socially aware experiences. Heritage-based tourism tied to marginalized histories appeals to younger generations conscious of ethical travel and cultural diversity.

According to the regional tourism board, experiential and educational tours now account for a growing segment of Madrid’s guided services. The market’s value could expand further if heritage organizations and city officials collaborate to develop official Afro-Spanish cultural routes, similar to Black heritage trails in London or Lisbon. This, experts say, would not only attract international visitors but also strengthen Madrid’s cultural inclusivity.

Ondo, however, cautions against commodifying the narrative. “This isn’t about turning pain into profit,” he says. “It’s about recognizing the lives that built our streets, our churches, our traditions. If we profit from this history again, without acknowledgment or repair, we repeat the same cycle.”

Public Reaction and the Changing Conversation

Public interest in these tours is growing quickly. Local media have begun covering the phenomenon, and social networks now feature snapshots of visitors standing before forgotten symbols — an engraved chain motif on a convent doorway, an archive record of baptisms of enslaved people in Lavapiés, an area historically known for its diversity. Comments under these posts often express both astonishment and discomfort.

Some residents welcome the shift, seeing it as long overdue recognition. Others question whether focusing on slavery risks reopening old wounds. Ondo and Toasije both acknowledge that resistance is part of the process. “History only heals when it’s heard,” Toasije says. “Ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear — it only strengthens the ghosts beneath our feet.”

City officials have yet to formalize support for these heritage initiatives, though smaller cultural institutions, such as the Museo de San Isidro, have begun to include references to Madrid’s African population in temporary exhibits. Private archives and universities are also contributing through digitization projects that trace the lives of Africans in Spain’s parish and city records.

A Reclaimed Narrative for the Future

As another tour winds through the narrow arches near Calle de la Paz, the air carries the hum of everyday Madrid — street musicians, students on scooters, vendors calling out their offers of roasted chestnuts. Yet amid these familiar sounds, a different rhythm begins to take shape: one of remembrance, rediscovery, and reconciliation.

For the guides leading these walks, the future lies in visibility. They envision a city map where sites like the Church of San Ginés or the Plaza Mayor are not only tourist icons but living memory spaces — layered with the voices and stories of those once pushed to the margins. The transformation is subtle but profound: every step on these tours becomes both an act of learning and a gesture of belonging.

As the afternoon sun dips over Madrid’s rooftops, Ondo closes another tour with quiet conviction. “This story is not someone else’s history,” he says. “It’s ours — the story of Madrid, of Spain, of the world that Africa helped build.”