López Narváez reconstructs touristification in Lavapiés as a transformation of the social and commercial fabric produced through urban renewal, rising attractiveness and the progressive reorientation of residential and commercial space toward visitors. The paper’s central contribution is genealogical: touristification is not treated as an autonomous market event but as the outcome of interventions, narratives and material changes that made the neighbourhood newly consumable. Historical review and statistical evidence are combined to show how the very qualities associated with Lavapiés’s distinctiveness—multiculturalism, marginality, migrant presence, countercultural history—could be re-coded as tourist assets. Methodologically, the work links planning history to later housing and commercial pressures, showing that “authenticity” can become an economic resource whose circulation changes the conditions of the place from which it is extracted. For café research, this is decisive: cafés do not merely respond to tourism but can become interfaces through which local difference is packaged, staged and consumed. The paper thus connects neighbourhood identity, urban renewal and commercial desire.