The asphalt wasn’t always there. Between the 1940s and 1960s, thousands of people arrived from Extremadura, Andalusia, and La Mancha to settle on agricultural land in the southwest of the Usera district. Today, those dirt roads that turned into muddy swamps when it rained make up Orcasitas.
The neighborhood takes its name from the original landowning family (Pedro Bernardo Orcasitas Ruiz), who owned a local hardware store. Faced with the hardships of the early shantytowns, residents organized to demand running water, electricity, and sewer service. They even helped build their own homes, choosing everything down to the color of the bricks and establishing Madrid’s first example of a participatory neighborhood.
Workers’ memory in the urban layout
The neighborhood’s character defines and documents its social achievements. The street signs display names such as Participation Street, Cooperative Circle, Youth Employment Street, and Bull Run Street. A fountain pays tribute to the first women who settled there, while a conceptual sculpture in the shape of a dove taking flight commemorates Arturo Pajuelo Rubio, who was murdered on May 1, 1980, by late-Francoist terrorists.
After overcoming the ravages of unemployment and heroin in the 1980s, the civic revival of the following decade culminated when the area was declared a Global Best Practice in Citizen Participation by UN-Habitat.
Its current infrastructure includes a community-run thermal power plant that provides low-emission heating. As a testament to an even more distant past, the skull and tusks of a Pleistocene elephant that roamed the area 150,000 years ago were discovered beneath this very ground.