People living next to Santiago Bernabéu venue say gigs – including those by Taylor Swift – are ruining their lives and are taking action.
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.”
Interesting. Here in the US my car has automatic day running lights, those are thin LED strips that brighten nothing on the road, but make my car more visible while driving. Those are turned on automatically when I start my car, but I can turn them off. Then I have my actual headlights, which should only be used at night. I can manually control those, though my car will automatically turn the headlights on if it detects it’s dark outside. Then I have high beams, which I need to manually turn on, are much brighter, and are meant to illuminate very dark roads. And my car has auto high beams, so they can automatically turn themselves off when they detect an oncoming car. I think a big issue is people turning their high beams on at night and not realizing they should only be used on dark empty roads, not when you are driving on a road with traffic. I’m surprised headlights are turned on by default and can’t be controlled.
They can’t be dimmed manually. On and off is a different story, though most people drive with their lights on at night, even in roads that have lights- and that’s fine.