Torres: An Intimate Portrait of the Kid Who Became King

years ago, when Fernando was just a boy and taking his first steps in the Atlético Madrid junior sides. The mayor also has a son who, when he was that age, enjoyed playing football but hasn’t become a champion like Torres.
    Around that time, by chance, he bumped into Fernando’s parents in the Colegio Amorós school in Carabanchel and spent some time chatting to them. He’s proud that his local administration has officially recognised El Niño: ‘He’s the city’s most important sporting figure, because he grew up here and started playing football here, because people think of him as their neighbour, even if, for some years, neither he nor his family have lived in Fuenlabrada,’ says Robles in his second-floor Town Hall office. Large windows behind him depict the town he governs. ‘El Niño is very much loved here and even more since his goal in Euro 2008. He’s very well-known internationally and has put our town on the world map. Only the other day, I did an interview for a radio station in Guatemala. The first thing they asked me about was Fernando.’ A 25-year-old, whose name the municipality will use for a new 90,000-square metre sporting complex containing football pitches, tennis courts, athletics tracks and a swimming pool. ‘It will be ready in 2010 and we hope that Torres can inaugurate it,’ explains the mayor.
    But what was Fuenlabrada like and what is it like today?
    ‘In 1973, it was a rural town of 7,000 inhabitants. But in the final years of the Franco dictatorship, there was a lot of property speculation. They gave thousands of permits to build and by 1979, we had a population of 57,000. The town grew chaotically without any proper urban development plan. In the 1980s, Fuenlabrada was the subject of a major internal migration process. Lots of young people came from (the Spanish regions of) Andalucía, Galicia, Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha, looking for work and a place to live. They settled here, next to a small community of Polish immigrants.
    ‘In 1995, we were witness to a wave of immigration from the Maghreb region and then from Latin America at the end of the 1990s. Today, Fuenlabrada has 209,102 inhabitants, 15 per cent of whom are immigrants from outside the European Union. It’s the fourth biggest city in the Madrid region in terms of population. It accounts for 25 per cent of the region’s industry, above all furniture-making and metallurgy. We’ve got 22 industrial estates and 30 per cent of the region’s small and medium-sized businesses.
    ‘In the last decade, we have greatly improved the residents’ quality of life. In terms of transport and communications infrastructure, thanks to new roads, the regional
Cercanías
train network and the metro, Fuenlabrada is now closer to the capital. In terms of education and culture, we have 70 teaching centres and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos campus, four theatres, a library for every 35,000 inhabitants, six sports centres, a basketball team playing in the ACB (the top division of Spanish basketball) and a football team in the third division.
    ‘It’s a city, and a very different one from that which Fernando knew when he was small. His neighbourhood, the Parque Granada, at that time was almost a village, where everyone knew each other and where the majority of people had arrived only a short time before. If there’s something that hasn’t changed, it’s the fact that Fuenlabrada continues to be one of the youngest municipalities in the country.’
    José Torres – Pepe to his friends – arrived in this ‘dormitory city’, 22 kilometres (about 14 miles) from Madrid in the 1980s from Galicia. He was born less than 20 kilometres from Santiago de Compostela, the regional capital. José is the second of nine children of Claudio Torres and Maruja. ‘Our Pepe, who is now 59, began at the army barracks in Pontevedra and later joined the police. He was deputy-inspector and after two years in the Basque Country, he requested to be transferred to Madrid, to Fuenlabrada (a new station was opened in 1987). Now he’s retired,’ recalled Claudio Torres recently. In Madrid, he married Flori, who is from the city, and bought an apartment in the street of Calle Alemania. It’s here that their three children were born and grew up. Mari Paz, the oldest and eight years Fernando’s senior, has a law degree and today works for Bahía International. Israel, seven years older than Fernando, has followed in his father’s footsteps.