When Delphine de Pontevès opens the window of her first-floor flat in Madrid a little before 10pm on a Tuesday night, more spills into the living room than the unforgivingly hot night air.
The voices and shouts of the crowds below give way to cheers, then to bass-heavy beats and music that will last until midnight and further stretch the patience of those who, like De Pontevès, live next door to the Santiago Bernabéu stadium.
Although best known for the past eight decades as the home of Real Madrid, the ground, which has just undergone a five-year, €900m (£756m) refurbishment, has over the past four months been hosting a series of high-profile concerts.
If the gigs have helped put the Bernabéu on the map with visiting singers such as Taylor Swift, Luis Miguel and, for four consecutive nights this week, the Colombian star Karol G, they have driven local residents to despair. Some have taken to referring to the stadium as a torturódromo, or torture-drome.
Fed up with decibels far exceeding legal levels, fans camping out in parks, drunk people urinating in doorways and the blocking off of residential roads, an association representing those living around the Bernabéu in the Chamartín neighbourhood is taking legal action against those responsible, including Madrid city council.
“It’s just hideous – you can’t move your car, you can’t take the dog out, and you’re having to prepare yourself mentally because it’s awful,” says De Pontevès. “It also creates health problems – lots of us are suffering from more frequent headaches, stress, anxiety and depression.”
Even when she concludes her demonstration and closes the window, the noise level is still as noticeable as if the living room TV had been cranked up high.
The problem, she adds, is not just the concerts themselves: it is the preceding three days of loud, daytime rehearsals; the litter; the urine; and the feeling that profit is being put far above people’s daily existences.
De Pontevès and her family, who have lived in their flat for 18 years, are accustomed to the noise and behaviour of fans on match days. But, as she points out, there is a big difference between a game a fortnight and months of loud concerts.
“The concerts need to stop,” she says. “The law doesn’t allow you to do this kind of thing. If I suddenly decided to rent my house out as a disco it would be shut down within a week.”
Although the city council is preparing to fine the promoters of concerts that have gone over the legal noise limits, local residents say the main problem is that the council and Real Madrid are using the stadium as a money-spinning concert venue when it should be used as nothing more than a sports ground.
The lucrative concerts they note, will go some way to helping the club pay off outstanding loans and structured deals that total about €1.2bn.
“[Real Madrid] have pushed the mayor to allow the conversion of the stadium from a sports stadium to a huge event venue,” says Claudia Martín, another local resident.
“But here’s the thing: the stadium has no licence to hold anything other than sports competitions or activities. The stadium can only hold ‘extraordinary events’. But when you hold extraordinary events – concerts – four days a week, then they’re not extraordinary any more. The city, together with Real Madrid, is systematically breaking the law every time a concert is held, and they couldn’t care less.”
Neither the city council nor Real Madrid responded to questions from the Guardian.
Marta Alvaré, who lives a block away from De Pontevès, says that neither the council nor the club seem to care about the concerts’ impact on those nearby.
“There are older people here and there are children,” she says. “There’s also a woman upstairs who’s in her 80s and is having chemotherapy. She can’t sleep and it’s hard for her children to get in to help look after her.”
Few, if any, local residents have drawn comfort from the city council’s promise this week to ensure that concerts end at 11pm, rather than midnight, and that street-cleaning services will be stepped up. What, they say, will any of that do to address the decibel problem?
Although those in the neighbourhood will have a six-week reprieve until the concert programme starts up again in early September, they are now finding themselves inundated with the additional hassle of aggressive messages from estate agents urging them to sell up and escape the noise while prices are still high.
José Manuel Paredes, a spokesperson for a resident’s association for those affected by the Bernabéu, wonders exactly what the conservative People’s party (PP), which rules Madrid city council with an absolute majority, thinks it is playing at.
He points out that antagonising voters in Chamartín, a barrio where 62% of people voted PP in the last municipal election, is a decidedly odd strategy. And while Madrid is a city with a long and proud tradition of grassroots neighbourhood action, few of its barrios are quite as well packed with lawyers, judges, journalists, executives, consultants and civil servants as Chamartín – hence the vocal, agile and well-resourced resistance.
But for Paredes and many other residents, the concerts are about something more fundamental than laws, business deals and local politics. He decided to push back after his 12-year-old son emerged from his bedroom one night at the end of May; he had a maths test the next day and was being kept up by the noise from Swift’s second concert in Madrid.
“He came to me and he said, ‘I can’t sleep and it’s not fair’. And that’s why I decided to get involved. What my son said was right: it’s not fair.”
