In Spain, A Young Woman's Killing Galvanizes Women to Assert Their Freedom to Run
Ángela Garrido loves to run alone through the streets of her native Seville.
“The feeling it gives me is fantastic. I put on my running clothes and wander wherever my body takes me, without a plan, without a schedule,” says the 24-year-old medical student. “I run to the rhythm of my music, speeding past pedestrians, carefully navigating vehicles. Running makes me feel like I could devour the entire world, like I could be ruler of the universe, like I could fly.”
Garrido knows one of Spain’s best-planned cities by heart. But even she recognizes the dangers that lurk for women who run. She avoids dark alleys and parks, and stays away from groups of idle men—safety precautions as familiar to female runners as the pure joy of running itself.
Women “can’t just go out and run whenever they want. They have to plan what they’re going to wear, when they're going to run, and where they’re going,” says Cristina Mitre, 42, a Spanish lifestyle influencer who has spent a decade promoting women’s running through her advocacy group, Mujeres Que Corren (Women Who Run). “I’ve turned around many times in the middle of the countryside because I didn’t feel safe. Or at night, I didn’t go out and run because I didn’t feel safe.”
Those hypothetical dangers became all too real for Spanish women last December, when Laura Luelmo, a 26-year-old teacher and artist, disappeared while reportedly out on a run.
Luelmo had moved to the tiny Andalusian town of El Campillo, in the southwest of Spain, to teach art at a nearby high school just weeks earlier. When she didn’t turn up for work on December 13, authorities began searching, and four days later found her body with signs of violent assault in a field outside of town.
The police quickly focused their investigation on Luelmo’s neighbor, Bernardo Montoya, a serial criminal (he’s spent more than 20 of his 50 years behind bars) who had been released from prison in October. In the early hours of December 19, the day after he was arrested, Montoya confessed, according to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
Spanish media gobbled up every detail of the story—the ultimate true-crime tale of an innocent up-and-comer preyed upon by society’s worst—and plastered it across headlines and chyrons throughout December. It was impossible to ignore.
Early in the investigation, before Luelmo's body had been found, Luelmo’s father and boyfriend searched her home with police and noticed a set of athletic clothes missing. News outlets ran with the early police theory that Luelmo salía a correr—was out on a run—when she was attacked, and it soon became uncontested fact.
As the story of the missing young woman rocketed across Spain, the country’s running community mobilized. Journalists, pundits, and activists wrote of how Spain’s women should be able to—but couldn’t—run in peace and safety. Running groups held solidarity runs and marches in cities across the country. The homepage of Carrera de la Mujer, a popular women-focused race series, was covered in black but for the text, “Never again run in fear.” And a demonstration against fascism in Seville morphed into a march in Luelmo’s memory. “Todas somos Laura,” the demonstrators chanted. “We are all Laura.”
“We’re all shaken by her killing, but also by the public discourse right now, that we should stay home, not go out at night, not go out alone, and now not even go out for a run, even at four in the afternoon,” activist Marta Blázquez told a Spanish newspaper at the Seville march.
Protesters chant: “Todas somos Laura (We are all Laura),” at an anti-fascism demonstration in Seville on December 18, 2018.
“My immediate reaction was to lace up and head out for a run,” says Angharad Davies, 27, who moved to Spain from Wales three years ago. “I felt the need to prove a small point—to show that the problem lies with certain depraved individuals, and that we as women shouldn’t shy away from doing something that we enjoy.”
As the investigation developed, authorities discovered that Luelmo actually hadn’t been running that afternoon, she’d been on her way back from the supermarket. But by then, the senseless killing of a young woman had galvanized the running community to challenge a nationwide culture of machismo that for years has stifled women’s participation in the sport.
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“It brought to light our vulnerabilities as women, and as runners,” says Davies. “It’s something that relates to us all as women who have experienced some form of intimidation in our daily lives.”
Last year, Runner’s World España conducted an online study of its readers, asking more than 2,500 women how secure they feel when running. (Runner’s World and Runner’s World España are both Hearst Corporation properties but operate independently.) Nine in 10 said they have felt insecure running alone, while 28 percent reported verbal or physical abuse. In 2017 Runner’s World published results of its own survey of American women in the feature “Running While Female,” which explored how, despite the fact that women dominate participation statistics, 43 percent of women who run in the United States at least sometimes experience harassment on runs.
Advocates say that barriers to safe running for women in Spain—including street harassment and gendered stereotypes of female participation in sports—stem from the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco, notorious for its oppressive enforcement of traditional gender roles in Spanish society. Though Spanish women runners competed at a world-class level in the early 20th century, a documentary produced by Mitre’s advocacy group details how, during Franco’s rule from 1939 to 1975, women were discouraged from participating in sports, and institutional support for female athletes was almost nonexistent. Only in the last decade, as Spain experienced a running boom similar to what the United States saw in the 1970s, has the activity become popular among Spanish women.
Mitre’s documentary “Mujeres Que Corren” explores the evolution of women’s running in Spain.
These days, the public perception of female runners in Spain has shifted from just a few elite professionals to anyone looking to embrace a healthy lifestyle, says Fran Chico, 51, who founded the women’s race series Carrera de la Mujer in 2004. The series now draws thousands of women to party-like races in eight Spanish cities, and Chico predicts gender parity across all races—men still dominate longer distances—in the coming years.
Groups like Mitre’s Mujeres Que Corren, as well as Levanta La Voz—the Spanish partner of the U.S.-based grassroots anti-harassment initiative Hollaback—provide group runs, training resources, and workshops on street harassment. Building off the Runner’s World España study conclusions, Mitre’s advocacy group partnered with European energy giant EDP, a longtime supporter of races in Europe, to create Sincronizadas, a mobile app that organizes running meetups for women in Spain.
“Sincronizadas is not sending the message, ‘You’re crazy for running alone outside,’” Mitre says. “We’re saying to those women that if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to run alone, here’s another tool. In Spain, it’s a right that has taken us over 30 years to win.”
Spain’s current political climate, which has seen an unprecedented challenge to the nation’s culture of machismo and the subsequent rise of an established far-right party for the first time since 1975, has only spurred female running advocates on. Luelmo’s death joined the list of several storylines—including the millions of women who marched and went on strike on International Women’s Day and the La Manada case, in which the lenient sentencing of five men accused of gang raping an 18-year-old woman sparked massive protests—tying the Spanish running community directly to the larger feminist movement.
Nowhere is that clearer than Luelmo’s untouched final tweet, an illustration of her own design celebrating 2018’s International Women’s Day. It’s now a digital shrine to which hundreds have replied.
“This isn’t a running-specific issue, it’s a societal one,” Chico says. “Spain has a problem, and now it’s out in the open, pushed by a massive, unstoppable movement.”
8-M pic.twitter.com/zWypBTvUUR
— Laura (@L_Luelmo) March 8, 2018
Spanish women see signs of progress in their growing participation numbers and improvements in the safety of low crime neighborhoods and major parks in cosmopolitan cities like Madrid. And Luelmo’s death has been a widespread catalyst for change—now on runs as much as in bars, offices, and homes.
“‘If they touch one of us, they touch us all,’ has been the slogan [of the Spanish women’s rights movement] since the La Manada verdict—any act of violence against a woman unleashes the reaction of hundreds,” says journalist Patricia Ortega Dolz, who covered the Luelmo case for the Spanish newspaper El País. “In a case as heavily covered as Luelmo’s, the same holds true. And when some said she was out on a run, that was the only fuse needed to ignite the running and feminist communities.”
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