While Stonewall was galvanising a new liberation movement in the English-speaking world, queer people in Spain under the Franco dictatorship were building something of their own — and Pasaje Begoña shows just how brutal the limits of that freedom could be.

The passage between two adjacent buildings had become an extraordinary queer enclave under a dictatorship where homosexuality was a criminal offence. Tony's Bar, believed to be Spain's first gay bar, anchored a strip of clubs that drew in international visitors — including, at various points, John Lennon and Grace Jones — and the tourist money they brought was itself part of why authorities tolerated it for as long as they did.

Then, on the night of 25 June 1971, that tolerance ran out. Police identified some 300 people in the area and arrested somewhere between 114 and 119 of them. Twenty-three venues were shut down, foreign nationals were deported, and Spanish detainees went to prison. It's sometimes called Spain's Stonewall, indeed in 2019 the passage was forever linked with the Stonewall Inn with a twinning ceremony.