THE LITTLE TRIP MADRID.
Who could ask for anything more?
“I’m playing the first set of the night, so come early,” says Agustín, DJ, mover, shaker, party-maker and editor of Shangay, Madrid’s (Spain’s!) most important gay magazine. “So I’ll see you there at about 3am...” And it’s not even Saturday!
Because this late-late-later thing in Madrid is all true. Dinner at 10pm is considered early; kids are still mucking around under tables dripping ice-cream on their parents’ washable suede come midnight; any bars worth their weight in cerveza only start filling up around 1am. And it’s not just because it’s hot during the day. It’s because Madrileños are naughty. They love staying up past their bedtime, and everyone else’s.
In the 1980s, when Spain was just a few years past living under a fascist dictator (that would be Franco), Madrid was giddy on naughtiness after so many years of having to be good, and it meant they tolerated everything. And everyone. If you went to the family swimming pool down at Puente de los Franceses there was a whole section for bare-breasted trans women, while even the Queen of Saturday night – their Cilla if you please – was a trans woman called Bibí Anderson. It may be a Catholic country but Spain is no Italy – and Madrid is, after all, the city that came up with brilliantly dotty gay film director Pedro Almodóvar, the naughtiest of them all.
This time round I’m staying in Salesas, an area I’ve barely heard of even though I lived in Madrid for years. It’s chic and quirky with ancient patisseries – La Duquesita, purveyor of delicious naughties to the royal family – squeezed next to state-of-theart interiors stores like Batavia and itinerant hip galleries atop random staircases, and it’s is a mere saunter from big old, gay old Chueca, once druy, then semi-gentrified, now a bit tired, but still with terraces to sit on to watch all the gays go by.
It’s the capital of what was once the most powerful country in the world with all the smart parks and regal buildings that go with it: the Palacio Real, for instance, makes Buckingham Palace look like an Airbnb, it’s that massive. And even though things have become way more sophisticated since those giddy post-Franco days, Madrid is still a glorious mix of the grand and the ratty: The Prado, one of the world’s greatest art galleries which you probably didn’t know until now, is a reasonable walk from the Rastro flea market where you can buy a single shoe or a book that’s got the final chapters torn out. Handy!
And, despite some economic doldrums and the competition of Barcelona, which knows how to tickle tourists much better (well, people like beaches), things are still moving in the right direction.
Take Malasaña, an area above the Gran Via, that used to be strictly for hippies and rockers and old ladies in slippers. It now has gay overspill from neighbouring Chueca and secret spots like Kikekeller, a weird little art and furniture shop that turns into a cool bar after dark, have sprung up. According to Agustín this is now the hot gay area and, going by the number of gay panties shops opening next to hundred-year-old (and looking it!) bars – La Bodega de la Ardosa, for instance – he’s got a point.
Chueca’s Blanco y Negro, the rancid little disco-bar that used to be the centre of everything with its flamenco drag queens and electro music, is still there but Madrid has moved on significantly nightlife-wise with pop-up clubs on a truly global scale boasting sky-high production values and that specifically camp sense of humour Madrid prides itself on: half naked go-go boys dressed in golfing trousers swinging golf clubs as they hit balls into the thronged revellers, anyone?
As for the gay thing, Spanish people couldn’t give a hoot – and barely ever could in recent memory. It was the third country in the world to introduce gay marriage back in 2005, eight years before the UK, and Madrid Pride in July is considered the number one biest gay party in the whole of Europe – take that Barcelona! – and certainly the sexiest. It’s one of the world’s great gatherings, gay or otherwise. And you can imagine the hour that goes on until.
It’s coming up to quarter to eleven, and there’s something about those hotel slippers that tell me I won’t make the 3am party rendezvous. “No worries,” chirps Agustín. “Let’s have really early cocktails then. See you down Cazador in Malasaña at 11.30...”
Where to stay:
Hotel Urso’s beautifully restored to showcase stained glass windows in the stairwell, a cage lift with a seat, cornicing that must have blinded at least one person to restore and a sunny, glass-roofed breakfast-room with grass on the wall, this grand hotel knows how to funky up a classic building. Add corner rooms so big and light-filled you can sunbathe right there on the floor, a to-the-point spa and cool restaurant (even if you’re not staying here) Media Raciones and you have the perfect spot a hop and a skip from gay Chueca.
Where to play:
Boite, where pop sensibilities bubble to the surface, you wear what you want and there’s a healthy mix of sexy and silly. Warning: these parties can get big. Chachá is the spot to rub shoulders with stylists from magazines, the models they’re talking to or anyone with a brain in their head and a label on their arse.
A country restaurant, rammed on a Wednesday, run as slick as a greased weasel thanks to a phalanx of young people in flannel shirts, jeans, Converse and butchers’ aprons. The Pig at Combe, near Exeter, is a country house hotel where you can choose to stay up here at the Elizabethan manor, in a converted stable round the back or down there, a two-minute Land Rover ride across the 3,500 acre estate, in a full-scale cottage.
And it’s a proper English cottage, the sort that Miss Marple might live in except for the fact that all her feminine frippery has been replaced by masculine tweeds and velvets: where she would have had porcelain shepherdesses, we have crystal decanters and Dualit toasters. Our sofas are hardy, the pictures old and distressed, the mirror mottled. It’s perfectly done.
Back in the restaurant – because the whole Pig concept (this is the fifth in a series that started back in 2009 when people very high up in hotels got together to create something cosy, cool and affordable) is based around the food. The food, fresher than your average daisy, is sourced from within a 25-mile radius (including their own garden) and is different every day according to what they’ve brought in. And we have a mixed crowd in tonight: a young white guy with dreadlocks, a pair of lesbians in heels, an older lady with all the right earrings. Certainly not the Daily Mail-reading country codgers you might expect.
Famous for their meat, we have lumbered The Pig chefs with a pair of vegans and – without so much as a twitch of annoyance – they pull out a choice of nine dishes veering from nettle soup through apple herb salad to rhubarb, all so fresh and healthy it’s like you’ve licked a field. The sommelier - as young and crisp as a chilled sauvignon blanc – talks us through tertiary notes and layers of flavour, coming up with Soaves that are barely there and smoky reds that just waft up your nose.
This dining room, like the rest of the place, is country chic: a stag’s head on the wall, some pinned-down butterflies, roaring real fires that you can poke to death, a view out onto a wall of green with some neighbouring Arabians cavorting – by which we mean horses.
It’s the feel of a country house in excellent nick but which hasn’t been taken over by a global chain, fitted up with all the same details and filled with every media twat from a hundred-mile radius, no names, no lawsuits. It feels authentic, down to the bunnies jumping past our door and the partridges strolling around like they own the place.
With Lyme Regis within lunching distance, the coast just six miles away and country walks through woods and across fields right on the doorstep, there’s plenty for the energetic. Then there’s a little Georgian folly out the back where you can have amazing flatbreads and a muscular red around a fire pit to recover from any of that activity.
So what is it that makes The Pig at Combe work so perfectly? Is it the combination of sophisticated cocktails and authentic country style? The extreme rural beauty of it all? The quality of that food with herbs still breathing as they hit your plate? Probably all of those things but the manager gives a bit of a clue when we get into how hard it must be to get big-city
service in the middle of nowhere. “It’s about how we select our staff,” she says. “Some people come with all the right experience, but they’re just not Pig-gy.”