“Metro de Madrid se sale del mapa” is the slogan. And it sounds a heck of a lot better in Spanish than in English. It’s just so hard not to read it as “Madrid Metro has fallen off the map” which was presumably not the intention of the publicista. I guess he wants to draw attention to the fact that, after the rush to inaugurar all those new stations in the run-up to las elecciones, they have now brought out a new Metro map so all the prolongaciones fit on a single page.
I’d been hearing mixed reviews about el nuevo plano for months and now I’ve finally got my own copy. Y, sinceramente, no me gusta.
To begin with, I need glasses to read it although it’s twice the size of the plano I remember from when I first came to Madrid. I suppose it’s possible that twenty years on me falla la memoria as well as my sight, but I think it’s more to do with the gris clarito that they have used for most of the texts.
Mind you, cuando llegué a Madrid, despite the map being both small and legible, I found using the Metro far more difficult than the London Underground, so it may just be una cuestión de familiaridad. The stylised Tube map, designed by Harry Beck in the 1930’s, was so much a part of mi infancia that its geographical inaccuracies were irrelevant. I had no problem knowing my Piccadilly Westbound from my Northern Line Southbound. The stations where the same platform was used for different lines held no fear for me, nor did the complex District Line organisation at Earl’s Court. If you could read, I reckoned there was no getting lost on the Underground.
Madrid Metro, however, was more awkward. It didn’t have dual-duty andenes, but you needed información adicional. It wasn’t enough to know you wanted the yellow line going south, you needed to know that the southern terminus of the line was Legazpi. Direction of travel was irrelevant with all lines being referred to by their end points. Además, it helped to know that the yellow line was la línea 3, as none of them had nombres and no one seemed to use los colores para orientarse. I lived in the centre and quickly got to know el corazón de Madrid, but Legazpi, Canillejas, Aluche etc. were out in the sticks, los barrios bajos which I had no cause to be familiar with.
Of course, over the years the Metro lines have been extended - más que nunca en el último año - and las estaciones a final de cada línea have changed. Sol is still “southbound” from Plaza España, but now I need to know that the yellow line goes to Villaverde Alto which sounds more like a Fairy Liquid advert than part of la capital de España.
I can still get confused over east and west, but at least there are only two of them to remember. The names of the suburbios de Madrid, on the other hand, are almost impossible for a guiri who’s never studied historia, geografía or literatura española. I have no mental hook to hang them on. A few years ago on a course at the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas, we struggled through una novela histórica. I felt a bit like the apocryphal Shakespeare reader who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a collection of quotations strung together: I was reading a book peopled by a map of Madrid: Cea Bermúdez, O’Donnell, Narváez, Cánovas del Castillo...
Hard Work
One thing that gets me about the Metro map is that it’s not intuitive. I imagine that the new “Hospital 12 de Octubre” is somewhere near el hospital epónimo - though Gregorio Marañon station is nowhere near el Hospital de Gregorio Marañon - but the Metro stop Quevedo is halfway across town from calle Quevedo. República Argentina is not too far from Colombia, but el Nuevo Mundo está en el quinto pino. No one who’s lived en el centro for any length of time can fail to have heard of the Malasaña area, but the new estación de Manuela Malasaña is way out on the Metro Sur circuit.
So knowing the city doesn't necessarily help. And the map no ayuda a conocer la ciudad. Distances are not even remotely logical on the new plano esquemático. Carabanchel and Carabanchel Alto used to be 1.5 cm apart on the old map. They are now 5 cm apart, although in reality the stations remain about a mile and a half away from each other as the cotorra verde flies. Ascao and Vicálvaro are also 5 cm apart, but in real life the distance is almost 6 miles.
The new map has nothing but líneas rectas -all verticales and horizontales: there aren’t even any diagonals. Línea 6, the “circular line” is shown as un rectángulo. Pio XII appears directly a la derecha de Plaza Castilla despite being due south. This would matter less if they hadn’t decided to include a compass as part of the leyenda del mapa. Oddly enough, at least in the last few years, when the map corresponded to a far greater extent to la realidad geográfica, no rosa de los vientos appeared.
Of course con el nuevo diseño han acertado in some things. Although Sol is clearly marked as important, it’s Chueca that is closer to the centre of the map - a point of view which seems to be apoyado by the impressive turnout for the recent fiestas de Orgullo Gay. And one definite improvement is that I can now claim to live “on the westbank”, instead of “south of the river”. I just hope the landlord doesn’t decide to subir el alquiler accordingly.
One of the arguments for the rediseño is that no one ever used the Metro map to find their way around the city, and some people do like the change. One friend who I discussed it with said that the new map was infinitely more elegant and a better design. But then, he drives a car. I suspect that’s the root of the problem: the funcionarios y diseñadores who are behind the redesign are not likely to be those who use el transporte público or who have to rely on these mapas topológicos y poco lógicos.
