Weekends are usually the most important days of the 17 days that the Madrid Book Fair lasts. This Sunday morning, however, there was concern and concern about the impact that the visit of Pope Leo XIV would have on the great event in the world of books. Since its arrival on Saturday, the streets have suffered traffic cuts, restrictions in main squares and the closure of several metro stations.
Sunday dawned like this: split in two. On the one hand, the tide of faithful that advanced down a car-free street in Alcalá towards the Plaza de Cibeles. While, Some people detour to Retiro Park, where the Fair tried to maintain its usual pulse. The vast majority were heading towards the place where the bishop of Rome celebrated the mass of the Corpus Christijust over 500 meters away.
There was half an hour before the 366 booths at the Madrid Book Fair would raise their metal curtains (at 10:30). And in front of one of them, Patricia Jimena, 22 years old, had been waiting since six in the morning. Sitting on the floor to be the first to get the signature of her idol, the youth writer Inma Rubiales. Behind her, a line of about 50 people stretches. The young woman assures that the one-hour journey from her house to the park “was not a problem.” Later a couple of friends joined in with whom I played cards, had a drink and they all carried the copy of a free friendby Rubiales.
From the organization they indicated that they had “reviewed the calendar and it looks like a normal Sunday.” Eva Orúe, director of the Madrid Book Fair, told this newspaper that “all the planned events have been maintained.” Booksellers, authors and readers “have gotten up early in the morning to be here at the opening,” he noted. However, the critical moment would come when the massive mass ended, “around noon.” The more than a million faithful could come to the Fair, as the mayor encouraged them last week.
“Since Saturday there were already mobility cuts but there was more assistance than expected,” Orúe added. Even so, the director admits that “there are a couple of cancellations in the program such as some authors (of the nearly 500 scheduled for today) who will not be able to attend due to mobility complications.” Especially those who come from outside. Such is the case of the writer Alicia Valdés, who made the decision, a couple of days before, not to go to the Book Fair “because of how impossible” it would be to access Madrid.
Canceling an appointment like this, for Valdés, “means facing the possibility that during one of the days in which the most sales are generated, you will not sell.” The organizers of the Fair estimated that in 2025 there would be more than seven and a half million euros in sales, not counting the last weekend. But saying no to the fair “is not just a logistical decision” on the part of Valdés, who lives in Asturias: “It is also a political positioning by someone who has been on an unpaid promotional tour for two months and is exhausted.”
Not everyone, however, has changed their plans. The British writer Jonathan Coe maintained his commitment of four signatures and an event in the middle of the day marked by the mass of Leo XIV. It is the first time that the author appears at the Madrid Book Fair and he admits to being “impressed by the enthusiasm that Spain shows towards books”, something that, he says, he does not find in England. He barely takes a moment between signing his work The proofs of my innocence (Anagrama) to confess that he found out two days ago that the pontiff would be in the capital: “But it doesn’t worry me, because my fans and those of the Pope are different people. So I don’t think we will steal the public.”
At mid-morning, with the end of mass approaching, the flow of visitors drew a singular map. Through one of the entrances to the Retiro, people entered with folding chairs and T-shirts with religious prints or the name of Leo XIV. Others like Esteban Ureña wore the Virgin of Macarena as a cape. The man from Jaén decided to go ahead with his son to the rest of the parishioners and they chose to go through the fair, “so that not everything is religion,” he jokes.
Meanwhile, the Paulinas bookstore, the only one specialized in religion, with a booth in the Retiro since 1997, waits for the faithful to come to its stall to buy the dozen new titles about Leo XIV. Julia and Esther explain that the Pope’s encyclical letter is “the one that demands the most interest.” “People want to know their thoughts, not just their biography,” they explain, in this work “they talk a little about AI and the vulnerability it can cause.” In Great humanitythe pontiff vindicates what makes us human. And indeed it is the first book they sell this Sunday.
A few meters away, at the height of block 6, the author whom they had been waiting for since six in the morning, Inma Rubiales, began signing copies in the Tejo Tent at 12:00. Almost six hours after arriving at the Retiro, Patricia Jimena and her friends are the first to approach the writer. In all that time, the chaos of the city was alien to them: the Pope’s massive mass had begun and ended, the thousands of attendees strolled under the sun through the pavilions of the Madrid Fair. If anything, the only thing that interrupted the normality of El Retiro Park in the morning was the noise of the helicopters.