Lorraine Williamson
Valencia’s Mercado Central is usually seen through the lens of food, architecture, and tourism. Yet beneath the familiar movement of shoppers, cafés, and guided tours lies a far more uncomfortable story.
The square was once linked to the buying and selling of enslaved Africans. Nearby, people were held before being auctioned. Today, there is little in the public space to tell passers-by what happened there. That silence is now becoming part of a wider reassessment of Black history in Spain.
A new cultural project in Valencia is helping residents and visitors read the city differently. Through guided routes, archive work and public activities, Cartografías de la memoria negra is recovering stories that were present for centuries but largely left out of Spain’s national narrative.
At a glance
- Valencia is revisiting its role in Spain’s history of slavery and Black communities.
- The project Cartografías de la memoria negra uses city routes, culture and archives to make hidden histories visible.
- Researchers say Valencia was one of the Iberian Peninsula’s major slave-trading centres around 1500.
- The debate is also about modern identity, racism and who is recognised as part of Spain’s past.
A city route that changes what people see
The Valencia project is led by cultural manager Deborah Ekoka, with historical contributions from researcher Jesús Cosano and collaboration with cultural institutions including l’ETNO, the Valencian Museum of Ethnology.
Its aim is not only to add forgotten facts to the record. It also asks why these facts were missing from public memory in the first place.
Walking routes through Valencia’s historic centre point to spaces connected with Black and Muslim communities. They also highlight locations associated with enslavement, trade, religious brotherhoods and daily urban life.
For many participants, the city begins to look different. A market square is no longer only a tourist landmark. A street name is no longer neutral. An ordinary corner becomes part of a larger story about power, labour, violence and survival.
Valencia’s slave-trading past
The history being recovered is not based on rumour or speculation. It appears in archives, notarial records, church documents and historical research.
According to historian José Antonio Piqueras, director of the UNESCO Chair on Slavery and Afro-descendance at Jaume I University, Valencia was one of the main slave-trading centres in the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century and beginning of the 16th. El País reports that between 1490 and 1520, more enslaved Africans arrived in Valencia than in the Americas during the same period.
Around 1500, Valencia was one of the peninsula’s most important cities. Research cited by El País says one in three merchants was involved in the trade in enslaved people. In some periods, around 14 per cent of the city’s population was enslaved, with about half of them Black.
Those people were not hidden from city life. They worked in households, workshops, commerce and public spaces. Their presence was part of Valencia’s social and economic structure.
When street names erase memory
The debate is also about how cities choose what to remember.
Valencia once had a Carrer dels Negres, or Street of the Black People. Today it is Calle de las Almas, or Street of the Souls. Madrid still has a Calle de las Negras, a reminder that traces of Black presence remain in urban geography, even when their meaning is rarely explained.
For campaigners and researchers, these names matter. Streets can preserve memory. They can also soften, rename or remove it.
That is why projects such as Cartografías de la memoria negra are not only cultural events. They are interventions in public space.
The forgotten Brotherhood of the Blacks
One of the most striking parts of Valencia’s Black history is the Cofradía de los Negros de la Sagrada Virgen María de la Misericordia.
El País reports that the brotherhood was founded in 1472 by 40 freed Black men. It functioned as a religious organisation, but also as a mutual support network. It helped members of the community in moments of illness, abuse, poverty and danger.
These stories complicate the way slavery is often remembered. Enslaved and freed Black people were not passive figures in someone else’s history. They organised, supported one another, defended community members and built their own institutions.
That does not soften the brutality of slavery. But it does restore agency to people who were too often reduced to records of sale, ownership or punishment.
Spain’s Black past was never new
The story also challenges a common idea: that Black presence in Spain is recent.
Activists and historians argue that this assumption contributes to the feeling many Afro-Spaniards still describe today — being treated as foreign even when they were born in Spain or belong to Spanish families. El País highlights this through the experiences of Afro-descendant Valencians involved in the memory routes.
This is where history and the present meet.
If Black people are absent from schoolbooks, plaques, tourist routes and national storytelling, it becomes easier to imagine them as outside the Spanish story. The archival record says otherwise.
Slavery was not always racialised
Another important point raised by Piqueras is that slavery in Spain was not always tied to Blackness.
Before large-scale trafficking from Africa expanded, many enslaved people in Iberia came from other regions, including parts of the Caucasus, Bulgaria and Greece. The association between Blackness and enslavement became stronger when the trade in enslaved Africans intensified and became more profitable.
That shift had lasting consequences. It shaped ideas about race, labour and belonging that did not disappear when slavery ended.
For today’s researchers, recovering this history is therefore not only about the past. It is also about understanding how old structures of prejudice can survive in modern forms.
A wider reassessment across Spain
Valencia is not alone.
Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Cádiz are also seeing routes, exhibitions, research projects and community initiatives that revisit Spain’s Black and slave-trade history.
The movement sits within a wider European debate about colonial memory, public monuments and the stories national histories prefer to tell. But Spain’s case has its own particular shape.
It is not only about overseas empire. It is also about what happened inside Spanish cities, in their markets, churches, streets, ports and homes.
Why the story matters now
The renewed interest in Black history in Spain comes at a time when debates over identity, migration and racism are highly visible across Europe.
For Spain, the recovery of this history asks a difficult question: how can a country understand itself honestly if part of its population has been written out of the story?
The answer is beginning to appear in archives, walking routes, museum collaborations and street-level conversations.
Valencia’s Mercado Central has not changed. Nor have the surrounding streets. But once their hidden history is known, they are no longer quite the same.