The old show apartment in the “Thousand Houses” neighborhood in Vicálvaro serves as the headquarters of the Vicus Albus association and the neighborhood museum, the only one of its type in Madrid. Inside, Valentín González spent more than four decades spending hours and collecting, with the rest of the entity’s members and neighbors, hundreds of binders containing documentation.
This man from Extremadura, a former municipal police officer, learned to investigate by consulting archives. “Mayor Tierno Galván was the first to give me a letter of recommendation to study at the Royal Academy of History.” Then, he continued to delve, now with his researcher card, into the Historical Archives, those of Simancas…
The museum contains pieces of great interest, “it has almost become a place of cultural cleansing,” he says, where neighbors bring everything. There is a copy of the first document mentioned by Vicálvaro, from 1352; the company typewriter Portland Valderrivas, the glasses of one of the pilots of the German Condor Legion plane that hit Atocha and fell in Vicálvaro, the model of the city’s old town hall – “dynamolated in 1974” – and part of its original balustrade, “which I found in the Casa de Campo.
You can see the scales on which the bags arriving on the Arganda train were weighed; or a light howitzer that served in the Vicálvaro barracks, which was previously a weaving factory, and which ended up housing the headquarters of the Juan Carlos I University.
Above, the mayor’s table which was used in the old town hall of Vicálvaro, with all its elements. Bottom left, Valentín González with a protest t-shirt. On the right, a plaque bearing the image of the old Town Hall
He believes that the worst thing that could have happened to this city and the 12 others that Madrid annexed in the 1950s was this annexation, and that if it had not happened, Vicálvaro today “would have 350,000 inhabitants ; “A study they did on us says so.” It is for this reason that he dreams of creating “the PNV, the Nationalist Party of Vicalvareño”.
