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I share in Las Fotos de los Lectores de La Vanguardia these two photographs, in which you can see a before (June 3) and after (after a few days) of the disappearance of the last telephone booth in the Madrid park of El Retiro .
You can appreciate the emptiness that it has left in the cobblestones where this cabin was located after so many years. Something is lost with the disappearance of the telephone booths, that romantic and melancholic air that they exuded.
Telefónica proceeded to withdraw since last year the 14,824 telephone booths that remained throughout Spain, after they have ceased to be a mandatory universal service.
The National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) had been asking the Spanish Government for a long time to eliminate this service, but the Executive had been postponing it year after year.
The operator that was obliged to maintain this service was Telefónica. The last award occurred in December 2019 and the contract expired on December 31, 2021.
In Spain, at the end of 2020, an average of 0.17 calls per day were made from any of these 14,824 booths. That is, one call a week. Two years ago, twice as many calls were made: 0.37 a week, or one every three days, according to Telefónica data.
In addition, 88% of Spaniards have never used a cabin, according to a study published in 2016 by the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC).
The telephone booth was installed in 1966 for the first time in Spain, although the first public phone booth dates back to 1928, which worked with tokens instead of coins, in Vienna Park (now Florida Park), an establishment located precisely in Madrid El Retiro park next to the Paseo de Coches.
