The future awaits

Malagueños, as a people, have many defects, which I prefer not to enumerate so as not to increase the list of those with animosity towards me; nobody likes to be told the truth to their face. But we also have a great virtue, which I have observed on many occasions: the ability to adapt to all that is new. I experienced it for the first time 15 years ago, when the AVE was inaugurated, on Christmas Eve, and anyone would think that for those first travellers, it was the most normal thing in the world to get on a high-speed train to arrive in Madrid two-and-a-half hours later; rather than the interminable hours it would have taken those of us that have had to spend time in the capital on the Talgo 200.

Well, exactly the same thing has happened again, this time with the metro in Atarazanas. It is a source of pride as a Malaga citizen to see how people have made the new infrastructure their own in a matter of hours, without even having time to learn how things work, finding it all out as they go along. Thus they arrive from El Palo by bus and change at the Alameda to go to Teatinos, saving time as the train does not have to battle with the traffic (charity at the steering wheel is not one of our strong points). They can also get on at Carretera de Cádiz to go to work in the city centre, and hundreds of other possible combinations.

Because it really has always been there. In the collective imagination there is no place for political arguments. Some, few, will know that the work was started by a PSOE government, the first phase was inaugurated by an IU councillor and the opening of Guadalmedina and Atarazanas has been carried out by a president of the PP. For the vast majority, the metro will have been done by the mayor, like everything in Malaga. It doesn't matter. For the Malagueños, and this is another of our virtues although sometimes it plays tricks, the past is past, and the future awaits like the flash of sunlight after going up the escalator of the metro in Alameda...