Anger in the pool: neighbors accuse a "family cartel" of taking over the tickets

Macarena is a lawyer with two children who lives in the neighborhood of La Chopera, in the south of Madrid.. He has an alarm set at 8:50, to which he responds with the diligence of a soldier facing a bombardment. “When the phone rings, I run like crazy to the computer,” she tells this newspaper. What it does is load and reload a page until 9:00, at which time the tickets go on sale.

This modus operandi, previously reserved for concerts and festivals, today concerns municipal swimming pools. Macarena knows that if she is not ready in the seconds after the town hall starts the sale, she will be left without a ticket to the Peñuelas pool.. He has studied it very well: “The normal thing is that they last between three and eight minutes, but there are days that do not even last two. When the alarm goes off, I stop whatever I'm doing, whether it's feeding the kids breakfast, taking a shower or, like yesterday, running up the street like a madwoman,” she says..

As for so many other parents, especially during a heat wave like the one we are going through, unparalleled since 1975, getting a place in the pool means having a calm morning. When he doesn't get it, the Via Crucis arrives: “Then I have to get into another pool, which means putting two small children on a bus, or convincing a friend to let us go to hers.”. At home, with this heat, we cannot be”, explains.

Someone explain to me why it is absolutely impossible to book a ticket to the Peñuelas pool, when there is usually room in the rest.

Are we facing the Live Nation of swimming pools? Here you have to make chicha pic.twitter.com/IkbDhkuKZA

— Ismael Monzón (@IsmaMonzon) July 18, 2023

Macarena's problem is the problem of hundreds of residents of the Arganzuela district. This summer they have found that the 540 morning pool tickets fly for no apparent reason. Once inside the enclosure, they explain, often it is not crowded. Where have all the tickets gone?

Last Friday a poster appeared on the door of the venue. Like Luther, he was going with the intention of causing trouble: “A cartel of fathers and mothers massively and organized a large number of the available tickets for the Peñuelas pool to later distribute them among the friends of a WhatsApp group”.

The cartel has generated an extraordinary stir in the neighborhood, which feels that they are usurping access to a municipal facility. Perhaps because of the focus of the text, the most annoying are the citizens without children. Cristina, 54 years old and a resident of Valdelasierra street, is a patron of the pool. “I'm sorry to say, but parents kill everything. They drop their children in the pool and do not pay the slightest attention to them. I have been going to Peñuelas for many years and I do not know the number of times that children have stepped on me, thrown me while swimming or hit balls. That now they keep the tickets seems like the last straw to me,” says the neighbor, who has contacted the Municipal District Board to tackle this situation.. According to his version, the Board has confirmed that they are aware of the existence of this group and, more specifically, of its creator..

The input group

This newspaper has been able to verify that the group exists and that it is made up mostly of parents. It is called “Peñueñas pool” and it is made up of more than 400 neighbors (400 is the limit WhatsApp has in groups). It was created by a neighborhood teacher and mother, nicknamed Roxy, to prevent tickets from being wasted when someone cannot use them, as she explained to ElDiario. Members of the group point out that the person responsible for the revolt is a neighbor, a Telemadrid worker without children, who has taken the issue personally.

The only rule that prevails in the group is not to talk about anything other than pool tickets. When someone has something to sell, they say it in the common forum and those interested are arranged privately. After a day, around 50 tickets are exchanged, theoretically for their starting price. Macarena, who does not have access to the group, receives the news with great anger: “It must be some kind of lobby for parents in the area. Here we are all very modern, you know? Those of us who take our children to schools abroad are excluded from neighborhood life, that's how sad it is”.

Another neighbor of the neighborhood, Miguel, laments the municipal system of access to swimming pools. “It's completely wasted. If, for example, five people go to the pool from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., when they leave there are five vacancies, but no one else can enter. This neighbor also admits that, due to the low price of the entrance, two euros, many find it worthwhile to buy them in advance, before knowing their plans: “Then, if you can't go, well, nothing, you only lose two euros. Better to have it and not be able to go than the other way around”. The point is that a neighbor, who did want to go, has run out of tickets.

In Madrid, a municipal swimming pool has not been built for 31 years. Since then, half a million more people reside in the city, and every day it is more difficult to access the bathroom. There are 142,642 inhabitants for each one, the highest average of the interior provincial capitals, while seven districts do not have any pool where they can refresh their neighbors.