Just 15 minutes from the centre of Madrid lies Europe’s largest shantytown: 16km of thousands of houses, shacks and tents lining the roaring M-50 motorway. The Cañada Real has been the Spanish capital’s forgotten neighbourhood for decades, both thriving and suffering in the city’s blind spot.

This multicultural community is home to about 7,300 people living in six sectors – but it is Sector 6 that has given it its somewhat fearsome reputation. Here, drug addicts shuffle along listlessly as the dealers flag them – and passing journalists – down to offer cannabis, cocaine and heroin.

“Sector 6 is the hardest bit,” says Ana González, president of Voces, a nonprofit organisation working in the neighbourhood. “A 1.5-km stretch of it is where the drug-dealing families live. It’s the worst you can imagine in the developed world. Everything is degraded, there is rubbish everywhere and people stare. If you accidentally end up here, you’ll get scared.”

The authorities have bulldozed many houses where drugs were sold; the dealers have generally responded by building shacks out of chipboard, plastic sheets and whatever structural elements they could reclaim from the rubble of their former homes.

“The other day, a girl drove the wrong way off the motorway and ended up outside my house. She was so scared that she was crying,” says José Luís, a Gypsy originally from the western region of Extremadura who moved to the Cañada Real six years ago.

It is precisely to destigmatise his neighbourhood that Luís is closely involved with 16kms, the area’s film festival, which residents are hoping will help to show it in a new light – and encourage Madrid to accept it as just another neighbourhood of the city.

Now in its fourth year, the festival runs the last two weeks of November across sectors 2, 3, 5 and 6 and features performances, concerts and workshops as well as film and documentary screenings.

Free buses shuttle visitors between the city and the festival sites, and maps are provided for drivers, along with instructions on how to avoid the drug-dealing part of Sector 6.

As well as screenings of mainstream films such as The Incredibles and a biopic of the Gypsy flamenco legend Camarón de la Isla, there are plays such as The Exception and the Rule, starring Money Heist actor Alba Flores, which confronts intercultural frictions.

A series of 20 workshops teach a variety of skills, including how to mend clothes, upcycle furniture, write music and prepare Arab and Latin recipes. Children will also join local artists to paint murals along the original 16km route the shantytown was built on, a former cattle trail, adding to works created last year with the street art group Boa Mistura.

The festival will also include documentaries directed and filmed by local children. These shorts, filmed on portable video cameras, are generally light-hearted, although the sparse, windswept play areas in which they are shot are symbolic of a much deeper problem.

Many children come to the Cañada Real’s various cultural centres and NGOs with low self-esteem and behavioural problems. González says: “They don’t just come [to Voces] to get help with their homework; they learn about themselves and how to interact with one another. Our duty is to empower these children, to show them their future and let them take hold of it.”

That means helping them write, direct and even star in their own films, some of which they’ve been working on for a year leading up to the festival. They also learn new skills, such as acting, music production and stop-motion animation – the latter a particularly valuable form of expression for the Cañada’s more conservative communities. “The Moroccan residents tend not to want their kids on film, so we’ve found that stop-motion is a very nice option for them,” Gonzalez says.

Cultural integration between the different nationalities living in the Cañada is part of the film festival’s mission. Spaniards, Romanians, Moroccans, Bolivians and members of 13 other nationalities reside alongside one another, but they don’t always mix. Food is a key way for residents to share their worlds with their neighbours. This is particularly vital for women, who, in the Cañada, tend not to have any earning power. For some, selling home-cooked meals to 16kms visitors is their first experience of economic emancipation.

But cooking for thousands of festival visitors presents a challenge for another reason: a lack of water and electricity.

Much of the Cañada Real is off-grid. In some parts of the older sectors, the streets are much like a quaint Spanish village except for the thick, contorted cables undulating between self-built properties. One family in Sector 5 have built their house around three pylons, a mini Eiffel Tower of humming electrical currents over which the children climb.

Life in the Cañada Real can be hazardous as well as tough, and many want to leave. “Rumours are circulating that some residents are only weeks away from being rehoused, but they’re often not true,” says María García, a volunteer at the church of Santo Domingo in Sector 6.

The council made a pact in 2017 to rehouse 150 families from Sector 6, but just 14 have been moved so far. Those who remain continue to breathe in smoke and ash from the nearby Valdemingómez incinerator, and residents are both living and dying with an abnormally high rate of respiratory illnesses.

And in Sector 3, which is set for total demolition, banners hanging from windows and fences proclaim the residents’ dismay at being asked to move: “I’ve been here since 1978 and I want to stay,” one reads. Instead, they want to be recognised as a part of Madrid. “We want electricity, running water, bin collections and post,” says José Luís.

Above all, they want to be recognised as good people. “Despite being a small part of the Cañada, the drugs market in Sector 6 is deeply stigmatising for the entire community,” says Susana Camacho, a social worker from the Gypsy Secretariat Foundation who has been working with the people of the Cañada for nine years.

When the scared girl turned up on Luis’s door, he felt terrible – he has three daughters of his own. “I gave her directions to get back on to the motorway – and she realised that we weren’t scary people after all.” The hope for 16kms is that in future people won’t come by accident but on purpose. As González says: “Art puts us on the map.”

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