The Embassy · A note from Chueca
They went home. They never left.
Something happened to us this year that nobody designed, and it has quietly become the part of this project we care about most.
Women come to Madrid for four days.
They find us before they arrive — a search at midnight in another time zone, a page about lesbian bars, a Telegram group with a human at the door. They ask whether the city is safe. They ask where people actually go, not where the guides say to go. Someone answers, usually within the hour, usually from a bar.
Then they come. They end up sitting on the grass in El Retiro with women they met six hours earlier. They go to Fulanita on a Saturday and come out at four in the morning with three new phone numbers and a hangover that takes a bowl of udon to fix. They eat far too much at Mercado de San Antón.
And then they fly home.
That is where the story was supposed to end. It doesn’t.
It started before Pride
We noticed it first in the spring, months before MADO. Messages began arriving from outside Spain — from England, from Latin America, from places we had to look up on a map. Women planning a trip in June, trying to work out in advance whether the city would be kind to them.
They weren’t asking for a guide. A guide is easy to find. They were asking something much simpler and much harder: will there be anyone there.
We answered every single one. It seemed like the obvious thing to do. What we didn’t understand at the time was that those conversations weren’t the preparation for the trip — the trip was the middle of something that had already started and was going to carry on long after.
The part nobody planned
The flight home should close it. You came, you had your week, you go back to your life, and you leave the group — because the group was for Madrid and you are not in Madrid any more.
Nobody leaves.
They stay for the obvious reason first: they might come back. But that stops being the reason almost immediately. They stay because at eleven at night, in another country, in another language, in a flat where nobody around them is quite like them, there is a conversation going on that they are part of. Someone is arguing about a bar. Someone is organising a walk for Sunday. Someone has just been dumped and is being talked down by five women she has never met in person.
It’s a kitchen with the light left on. And it doesn’t close just because you moved away from it.
And then the whole thing turns around, which is the part we never saw coming: the women who stayed start being useful to the women who travel.
What a network actually is
Someone from Madrid plans a week somewhere else and asks in the group. And a woman who lives there answers — not with a list of bars, but with tell me when you land.
That is a completely different object from a travel guide. A guide can tell you where to go. Only a person can tell you where you’ll be welcome, and only a person can come with you the first time so you don’t have to walk in alone.
So when we say the bond outlives the trip, we don’t mean it sentimentally. We mean it works. A woman here now knows a woman in Manchester, and one in Mexico City, and one on the other side of a border she will probably never cross. Not as followers. As people who answer.
That is very hard to build on purpose and almost impossible to buy. It happened because a few people kept replying to strangers.
It became the way we live
We never set out to build an international anything. We are a neighbourhood project. We write about bars in Chueca and organise board games on a Tuesday.
But at some point this year it stopped being a nice thing that occasionally happened and became simply how we are. On any given week there are women in this group in three or four countries, awake at different hours, who know each other’s business. Being connected to people far away isn’t a feature of what we do any more. It’s the texture of it.
And there is something underneath it that is worth saying out loud. For a lot of women, in a lot of places, there is no version of this where they live. No bar, no group, no Tuesday. Knowing that there are women elsewhere who would pick up — that is not a small thing to hand someone. In some places it’s the only thing.
If you’re reading this from somewhere else
You don’t have to be in Madrid. You don’t have to be planning to come. Plenty of people here aren’t and aren’t.
How to come in
La Tribu is our private Telegram community for sapphic and queer women. It is free. There are no fees, no membership, and nothing is sold inside it.
Every request is read by a person, so approval can take a few hours. That filter is the whole reason the room feels the way it does.
Once you’re through the door, go to the section called Embass. That’s where the rest of the world is — the women who came and went home, and the ones who never came at all.
You came for four days. Stay as long as you like.
Questions people ask
Do I have to live in Madrid to join?
No. A large part of the community lives outside Spain. Many joined while planning a trip to Madrid and stayed after going home; others have never visited at all. The section called Embass is where the international members gather.
Does it cost anything?
No. La Tribu is free. PrideChueca has no membership fee, no subscription and no paid tier, and nothing is sold inside the community.
How long does approval take?
Usually a few hours. Every request is reviewed by a person rather than automatically accepted, which is slower and is the point.
What is PrideChueca?
An independent community project based in the Chueca neighbourhood of Madrid, centred on sapphic and queer life. It is not part of any federation, association or network, and it is not affiliated with any larger organisation. It runs a bilingual website, a private Telegram community called La Tribu, and a physical recognition system documented publicly in El Archivo.