La Gatoteca In Madrid Serves Excellent Coffee With A Side of Cat

Located on Calle Duque de Rivas, 7 in Madrid, Spain, is La Gatoteca, the perfect café for cat lovers. Here, you not only get to enjoy a good cup of coffee but also make a new feline friend to spoil for a while. The coffee doesn’t exactly come cheap, but it is worth the price to spoil a cute cat and maybe adopt one.

La Gatoteca – the perfect café for cat lovers in Madrid

Madrid, the capital of Spain, is full of history, culture and art, with its great museums and galleries. The city is also a shopping Mecca for those who love retail therapy. However, after exploring the city you might need to take some time out to relax and enjoy a cup of coffee. Moreover, those with a love for cats have the perfect place to go.

Located at Calle Duque de Rivas, 7 in Madrid, La Gatoteca serves an excellent cup of coffee. Meanwhile, it also is the perfect place to spend time with some cute cats and maybe take one home. While coffee doesn’t come cheap here, patrons get their own cat to spoil for a while and it is in an excellent cause.

Purr-fect place for homeless cats

La Gatoteca is a cat café and has been running for around 11 years in the heart of Madrid. Not just an ordinary café, it takes in abandoned and homeless cats in the city to find them a good home. The two-story café usually has around 14 cats in residence and they live really comfortably until they find a new home. When entering La Gatoteca, it is clear that the felines are at home and comfortable. However, as soon as a customer sits down to enjoy their coffee, a friendly cat is quick to join them.

A cat lover herself, Eva Aznar is the owner of La Gatoteca and she told El Pais that she originally got the idea from Japan. Apparently, Japan has a couple of hundred cat cafés, opened to help the felines find a new home. However, Eva also works with ABRIGA, an organization that works towards finding cats a new home. Since then, the café has found homes for many loving felines.

How to adopt a cat from La Gatoteca

The cat café usually has a waiting list of some 15 felines and Eva works with several volunteers. While initially, it was a steep learning curve, deciding which cats to take in. Aznar explained that they took in cats from people who could no longer look after them. However, they soon found these cats were too spoiled and didn’t fit well in a multi-cat café.

Meanwhile, she explained it normally takes around two weeks to find cats a good home. “We try to make the adoptions as personalized as possible,” says Aznar, explaining that people must first join ABRIGA and pay a fee before adopting a cat. Moreover, potential cat owners must attend a beginner’s course in cat care.

“We help animals that have no home, but also cats that already have one. Many owners don’t know how to look after a cat properly,” she added.

For those readers living in Madrid, La Gatoteca is the ideal place to not only enjoy a relaxing cup of café con leche but also to find a new pet. For cat lovers visiting Madrid in Spain, missing their own pets at home, the café is an ideal place to spend some quality time with a friendly cat. Visit their website (in Spanish) here.