Yumbo Center

About this place Yumbo Center

The Yumbo Center is Europe's largest gay entertainment complex — a four-storey open-air shopping and entertainment centre in Playa del Inglés that houses more than 50 gay bars, clubs, saunas, restaurants, shops, and cafés under one roof. There is no direct comparison for the Yumbo in any other European city: gay bar districts in Amsterdam, London, Berlin, and Madrid spread their venues across walkable neighbourhoods; the Yumbo concentrates everything into a single accessible complex that operates as a shopping centre by day and transforms into the most intense gay nightlife destination in Europe by night. The complex is architecturally unremarkable — a standard 1970s resort shopping centre — but what happens inside it is not unremarkable at all. By 11pm on any night of the year, the four levels are populated by gay men moving between bars, the outdoor terraces are packed, the sauna facilities are operating, and the clubs at the upper levels are filling for their respective nights. The scale of the complex means that different sections attract different subcultural identities: bear-oriented bars, leather bars, mainstream pop bars, clubs with resident DJs, karaoke bars, and everything between. The Yumbo is simultaneously the most convenient and the most concentrated gay destination in Europe, and its year-round operation — unlike virtually every other major gay venue in Southern Europe — makes it the default answer to the question of where to go in the winter months.