ALAS is the LGBTI association that does most of the organising in A Coruña. It runs the Coruñés Observatory against LGBTIphobia together with the city council, which is where people go after an incident, and it puts on the training, the talks and the annual Pride march.
Its work spreads wider than the nightlife end of the city. Sexual health and HIV prevention, mental health, support for migrants and refugees, older LGBTI people, visibility in the rural parishes around the city, trans employment, school workshops, culture and sport all have their own strand.
The association traces itself back to Milhomes, the collective that began organising here at the end of the 1980s and wound up in 2005. That name came from the first gay character in Galician literature, in the novel A Esmorga. ALAS also gives the Marcela y Elisa awards, named for the two women who married each other in the church of San Xurxo in June 1901, the first documented marriage between two women in Spain.
The office is a ground-floor unit in the Sagrada Familia district and works by appointment rather than as a drop-in centre. For a traveller this is the address worth having if something goes wrong, not somewhere to spend an evening.
The people in this picture are AI-generated.
