Only 15 kilometers from the Puerta del Sol, the heart of Madrid, the Cañada Real extends, the largest informal town in Europe, with more than 8,000 people, which is five years old without light. “We are like a refugee camp, but worse.” Thus Maria summarizes her life in a neighborhood that has reached the screens of Cannes. House in La Cañada Real, the largest informal town of Europe Maria does not know that the Cannes Festival exists and that the film ‘City without Dream’, by Guillermo Galoé, inspired by a family in La Cañada, has just won the award of the Critics Week in the French city. He lives in sector VI, the last and most forgotten of those who make up the town and the one known as the “largest drug supermarket” in Europe. It is also the largest of this “linear city” of 16 kilometers, which rises on the banks of a street of about 70 meters wide, in public land, which was populated in the middle of the last century with the rural exodus and with the arrival of immigrants. Sector VI of La Cañada is a slap for 21st century Spain. Next to the highway that leads to Madrid, garbage and junk give way to dozens of drugs sale, aligned in the street where children play, mothers walk with their babies and adolescents with platinum hair raffle underfolds with their motorcycles. 4,000 people live in this sector -at least 1,800 children, according to the census -and lack electricity supply since 2020. More than 8,000 people live in the six sectors of La Cañada, the vast majority, Spaniards of Gypsy Ethnicity, Maghreb, Romanian and Portuguese.
