Is this shopping mall the gayest place on Earth?

Dario Villalba, 29, a shirtless actuary from Milan, roars into the night, jumping in a sweaty briar patch of men on a far-flung Spanish island. “Sempre! Sempre!” he cheers. “Sempre di più! Yumbo per sempre!” (“Always and always! More and more! Yumbo forever!”) As a Bruno Mars remix blares, Villalba revamps the chorus: “Sleep tomorrow, but tonight go crazy. All you gotta do is just meet me at the—’Yumbooooo.’”

Opened in 1982 with the hope of “if you build it, they will come,” Yumbo Centrum now bills itself as the world’s only LGBTQ+ mall: four floors and 200 venues across 200,000 square feet of open-air Brutalist bedlam. Those numbers shape the dimensions of a surprising truth about this obscure locale: it just might be the gayest place on Earth. Yumbo anchors the resort town of Maspalomas, on the southern tip of Gran Canaria, part of Spain’s Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. But it also anchors a LGTBQ+ community for whom Yumbo is a place where they can become themselves. 

“It feels like family. Even strangers feel familiar,” says Huw Davies, 73, a Welsh retiree who first came to Yumbo in 2005. “I’ve never been anxious when I’m here. That’s real freedom. That’s real love.”

Yumbo’s official Pride Week celebration is in May, but at Yumbo, Pride never really ends, buoyed by LGTBQ+-focused parties and events almost every month. Year-round, the polyglot crowds gravitate to the world’s universal languages: dance, laughter, music, and rizz. Yumberos—that’s the locals’ name for visitors—come for round-the-clock sex positivity, and all the accompanying pleasures. Everyone at Yumbo is living their best main character life. The open relationships, the ride-or-die friend squads, the dads burping their babies at midnight; they all radiate Yumbo’s gestalt glow. 

“Yumbo breaks all the rules—the patterns—and you find a new kind of gay life here,” says Leo De La Rosa, 39, a model from Madrid, as he strolled the mall. 

Even Yumbo’s workers share the vibe. Take Jean-François “Jeff” Renard and Thierry Fontaine, elderly husbands from Toulouse who dress up like burlesque twins and gadfly about before working together at a bar where they hold court. Or shy Osman, the locally born-and-raised 22-year-old who mans a tiny grill in the parking lot, selling $5 bratwursts from 9pm to 6am and, as he put it, “learning that things can also grow in moonlight.” Or Gonzalo Benabu, 37, Yumbo’s Argentine magojista (“massage wizard”) who fills his downtime with whispered prayers as he holds the dog tag necklace his mother got him inscribed with one word: sagrado (“sacred”). 

Yumbo can be anything, from campy to earnest, or romantic, sometimes all at once. 

Simple people in a simple place

For all its hype of diversity, queerness often suffers from an aesthetic sameness derided as “clones”—an ironic homogeneity in fashion, music, physiques, and other aesthetics. Yumbo challenges clones, beginning with its labyrinthine layout of aggressively unstylish concrete and extending to its unexplained dinosaur mascot—a green brontosaurus with red stegosaurus plates—who wears a red bow tie. It’s not shabby chic, just plain shabby. It’s all decidedly counter-American (not opposed to Americans who are plentiful) rejecting the habit of turning gay havens into luxury real estate.

The only freestanding structure in Yumbo’s massive central courtyard is a Burger King where workers wear Pride t-shirts instead of corporate uniforms; it somehow has a rooftop “secret garden” bar sponsored by Absolut. Yumbo also has a pyramidal mosque, an on-site doctor, a Wall of Love for sentimental scribblers, an AIDS memorial cactus garden, casinos and arcades, a park dedicated to a local gay rights hero, and an 18-hole rooftop mini-golf course. 

It has bars and clubs for every legal passion and proclivity. There are rainbow benches and staircases. A massive central courtyard full of men dancing to a Lady Gaga tribute band or remixed versions of a Journey medley from the television show Glee or the Brokeback Mountain theme. There are competing drag comedy shows, sports bars where the sport is Eurovision (a pan-European song competition known for its over-the-top kitsch), and drink specials so extreme that beer can be cheaper than water.

Every inch of Yumbo is lathered in camp surprises: a spa where fish can nibble customers’ feet, bars themed around gladiators or pirates, a bar that raised $68,000 to train seeing-eye dogs, restaurant menus with as many as 229 dishes and a dizzying array of chaotic bric-a-brac including an inspirational Beyoncé mug, rainbow mankinis, bobbleheads of Princess Diana, a Palestinian fútbol jersey, fur coats, a $850 crystalline Hulk beside a $570 crystalline Chewbacca, homoerotic sculptures, suggestive chefs’ aprons, and rainbow sunglasses that read “I LOVE MY GAY.” 

But yumberos can still buy on-trend clothes including good boy shirts, letterman jackets, neckerchiefs, and rompers. Plus, vending machines sell adult unmentionables as casually as bags of potato chips. Its eclecticism reminds yumberos that queerness is free to be whatever queer people want it to be. 

Cloning curdles gay travel too, homogenizing destinations into the same bougie beach blur. Yumbo, by sharp contrast, sticks out like a sore thumb. And yet its chiefly European crowds are choosing Yumbo over continental queer hubs like Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Madrid, and Mykonos. 

“I can’t stand gay people who think they’re richer than everyone else,” says Mohamed Drifel, 36, a hammam manager from Marseilles. “I like simple people in a simple place. The people here are simple. We’re all the same, and I like that.” Most yumberos arrive by bus; it costs $3.95 from the nearest airport. Last year, 60 percent of the island’s tourists made between $28,000 and $85,000.      

They even win over the locals.    

“From the moment I enter Yumbo, I put on my shirt so no one will think I am for anything strange,” laughs Luis Paredes, 45, a local nurse. “I associate it with something grotesque, a little decadent, and quite tacky.” He pauses. “But it can be fun.” His pause breaks into a smile, remembering his second-ever boyfriend, who he met in Yumbo. “In general,” he says, “yumberos are respectful—even if they are uninhibited. That’s a rare combination.”

A shared paradise

Yumbo’s bars are themed with a European candor: Eiffel bar for Francophiles, Bärenhöhle for Germans, Club Mykonos for Greeks, Ola Nordmann for Norwegians. Corey Vuhlo, 37, a supply chain worker from Berlin, recalled working in lederhosen in the German section of Disney’s Epcot Center, where he defied tourists’ expectations as a Black German. 

“Similar people come here, of course,” he says over a Burger King lunch, “but more chill. Friendlier.” His friend Mucho (“he’s a lot”) piped up: “The only thing better than smooth talkers are the rough ones.” Vuhlo laughed and continued: “It’s nice to see gay life as more open-minded. Not so fussy. It’s kinda trashy here in a fun way. It’s so ‘80s.”

That ‘80s vibe might be intentional, guesses Alonso Santa Cruz, 32, an anthropologist from Seville, over beers. Any sanctuary Yumbo offered after its 1982 debut was immediately dimmed by the early, merciless years of the AIDS epidemic.“It’s a bit of a theme park for older generations that couldn’t have possibly had this in the ‘80s or ‘90s,” he says. “It’s really harmonious. Not peace exactly, but truce. It’s like a shared paradise. Every group has their own heaven but here is a heaven for all.”           

Of course, Yumbo is not immune to criticism, as a French lesbian couple attested while passing Tom’s Bar, a Yumbo hub that bans women and drag queens but welcomes dogs. “Yumbo is a physical manifestation of the LGBT community,” says Cristina Agüimes, 29, a physical therapist from Lyon. “Tell me. Where do lesbians go?” she asks. “We have almost nothing. This is better than nothing. It’s not paradise. But it’s a start.”     

For all its camp distractions, Yumbo is a reminder that while the straight world defines travel as a fantasy, pilgrimage or escape, queer people have remade travel as a double-down embrace of their true selves, the adventure within, free from the pervasive anxiety of navigating the infinite obstacle course for otherness. 

“As gay people, we’re always coming out,” says Alan Thompson, 44, a personal trainer from Glasgow. He moved to the Yumbo area last year with his husband, Derec. They got engaged at Yumbo in 2018, sharing the stage with drag queens Michael Marouli and The Vivienne. “In Yumbo,” he continues, “you can stop coming out. It’s so freeing. We’re so happy to live in the Yumbo bubble as we see gay rights go backwards back home and around the world.”