The Rastro is a street market held every Sunday in Madrid. An urban, social and sensory phenomenon. Marina questions the capacity of this event to transform territory. From both its historical roots and its contemporary condition, she analyses how the streets of the Embajadores neighbourhood host something that becomes a mechanism of identity and collective memory.

The traces left by the Rastro, the vestiges inscribed in the city throughout the rest of the week, must be considered beyond the ephemeral life of the Sunday event. This distinction makes it possible to analyse its ability to generate new relationships between inhabitants and visitors, configuring a sensory landscape that brings cultural meaning to Madrid. Throughout the research, the Rastro is explored as a contemporary ritual that articulates tradition, sociability and urban experience.

Marina conducts five dérives through which, via walking, unprejudiced observation and multisensory perception of space, she records the events occurring around Plaza de Cascorro and Calle Ribera de Curtidores. Cartographies, photographs, sound recordings and notes allow her to identify patterns, intensities and micro-events that articulate the experience. She translates these experiences onto paper through sensitive maps inspired by Tschumi, Nolli and Venturi.

The perspective of the Rastro as vestige looks back to its origins in medieval slaughterhouses and to the consolidation of the neighbourhood as a hub of trades, highlighting how certain physical elements preserve the memory of the event: the topography, the numbered paving stones, the historical traces.

Understanding the Rastro as a signal means recognising it as a cultural symbol, passed down through generations, capable of projecting a representative image of Madrid at both a local and tourist scale. From this viewpoint, the author interprets objects, sounds, smells and rituals of sociability as parts of the market that confirm its condition as a shared experience. Finally, the third approach: the concept of the event. It allows the Rastro to be understood as a temporal irruption that reconfigures the use of public space, modifying flows, activating perceptions and generating unrepeatable scenes understood through the simultaneity of movement, action and space.

Marina’s dérives result in the unfolding of an urban choreography. The shops expand their sphere; the stalls reorganise space; visitors construct collective narratives; and micro-incidents, such as bargaining, spontaneous performances or clusters of onlookers, reveal the unstable condition of the event. The Rastro operates as a total event, an assemblage of historical, sensory and social layers. Its weekly repetition sustains the identity of the neighbourhood and contributes to an understanding of urban space as a constantly transforming stage.