Antonia Talavera Pérez (Madrid, 93 years old) and her husband were friends of , founder of EL PAÍS and Prisa, so they followed the birth of the newspaper very closely. On May 4, 1976, the day the newspaper came out for the first time, they ran to the newsstand to buy a copy. “I still have it. We bought it out of friendship, but also out of ideology. We wanted a change and EL PAÍS was the change,” she says, sitting in the living room of her house, an apartment full of memories on Serrano Street in Madrid. In these 50 years many things have changed. Below Antonia’s house, for example, there was a butcher shop and a flower shop. . Her husband passed away a long time ago. “Don’t ask me when, I forget the dates,” he apologizes. They met working at the La Paz Hospital. She was a nurse and he was a cardiologist. “Before he died, they tried to get us to leave this house. I parleyed and got them to let us stay. And here I am still.” Now she is the only neighbor left in the building. “No one lives anymore, I don’t see anyone,” he laments. But there is something that has not changed for her: she has breakfast every day at her kitchen table reading EL PAÍS.
