Noise is the largest complaint my spouse has with dense buildings. I tune things out easily, but I also found myself self conscious about walking softly when I lived above people.

Me too. What's annoying is it seems hard to tell what it's going to be like before you actually move in.

I've lived in a few different flats in the UK, all purpose built flats. I already knew flats in converted houses are generally terrible. I've been in some where you can hear everything your neighbour is up to. I'm not sure what's worse: hearing them or knowing they can hear you too.

In two of them I could never hear a peep from the neighbours apart from footsteps on the floor upstairs. But seriously wondered if the neighbours ever made any noise at all, or whether it was just that well soundproofed.

In my most recent flat, though, it's terrible. You can hear conversations through the floor but what's worse is when people make direct contact with walls/ceilings, like closing curtains or closing doors, it's like they are in your room. And this is despite the building having solid concrete floors that appear to be over a foot thick.

I do also wonder if it was really an illusion as the first two flats were in noisier areas. But, whatever the reason, it's so hard to tell what it's going to be like before moving in. I wish there standards so you could guarantee what it's going to be like.

But until then, I will be seeking detached housing because I just can't stand the noise.

> And this is despite the building having solid concrete floors that appear to be over a foot thick.

The noise is coming in through the holes made to put plumbing - especially district heating.

In my current apartment the owner wanted to conceal the piping, so he hid it behind an enclosure made out of plaster with a service hatch.

The whole thing is currently a resonance chamber that lets me follow my dowstairs neighbour's conversations.

This is my theory with respect to hearing voices from downstairs. It only takes the tiniest little air gap to make a huge difference and I can tell there is one somewhere.

I'm not sure about the problem with direct contact with walls/ceilings, though. I suspect this is more down to the construction and the walls/ceiling being directly attached to the concrete shell, or something.

I can confirm this. I am from Spain and I have lived in a few cities all around the country and the lack of soundproofing in every building is a common thing, regardless of town or area, it seems like all buildings from 1970 were built ignoring any sound proof.

The Spanish just don’t seem to care about noise at the institutional level. I spent a week in a small Spanish city last year & the local rubbish collection went down the street outside the door, pouring bins full of bottles from the local bars in the back at midnight. Midnight! Just when even the Spanish are trying to get to sleep.

Co-incidentally, there was an article in the Spanish national press that week detailing all the ways in which noise in Spanish cities was deleterious to health & wellbeing and asking why no-one ever did anything about it. Constant noise just seems to be accepted as being an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be fixed.

> Midnight! Just when even the Spanish are trying to get to sleep.

I had to chuckle when reading this, although I would point out that not all neighbourhoods are the same. Still, every spaniard knows that trying to call the local police because there is some idiot throwing a party at 1AM is pointless.

This was midweek in the autumn after the bars had all shut & everyone had gone home. It might even have been a bit later! Either way, my point is that it was the worst possible time to be upending bins full of glassware in a residential area. That noise was far louder than the people in the bars had been an hour earlier.

The actual truck that collect those glasses pass between 2 to 4am. What does it do? It lift the glass collection tank and let the glass fall into the truck bed. So yes I don't think anyone cares that someone if binning some glassware one hour before the truck will do that same noise at much higher scale.

I was referring to the truck here, not the individual bars putting their bins out. They closed relatively early for Spain, as it was mid-week & not high-summer.

The truck then came crashing down the street a little later...

Ah yes. I guess they do that so that it doesn't take 3 to 4times the duration because of traffic.

I am living in south of spain and not only spanish do not care about hearing noise, I think they actually do like being noisy and hearing noise. They are basically shouting all the time instead of talking for example. At the beginning I almost felt I should have interrupted couples in the middle of their conversations. I thought they were arguing and were about to become physical against each other, shouting mere inches from each other face with arms throwing all over the place. But no, you quickly realize they are just talking about trivial things, agreeing on something or just complaining about something external.

Living there you kind of get used to it.

Chileans have "spaniard" jokes reflecting this (or they used to in the 80s anyway)

> They are basically shouting all the time instead of talking for example.

That's my experience as well. Sometimes it's hard to tell apart if there's a bar brawl happening on the pub down the road or if it's a grou having a good time. It also doesn't help that in both cases Spaniards curse like crazy.

>Spaniards curse de puta madre

corrected for you :)

Touché

I am living in Andalucía (originally US) and have had the _exact_ same experience. I have gotten used to it...except for when my upstairs neighbors decide to make a glorious racket every night at exactly midnight, right when I'm trying to sleep.

Other than that though...!

Noise is not the biggest problem: Cheap apartment buildings from the 60s and 70s has such thin walls what they have no thermal isolation whatsoever. In poor neighborhoods you will see air conditioner machines everywhere because there is no other way to keep the flats livable.

The Spanish love the noise is my theory. They are a very social people. They probably think of it as comforting versus annoying, and like the person that lives next to the waterfall that can't hear it, it probably fades into the background of their consciousness.

(I lived in Spain for two years.)

> The Spanish love the noise is my theory

Totally. I think to them it represents and demonstrates liberation, freedom, fun, family and community. Loud means fun to them.

People complaining about noise are seen as serious party-poopers.

Spaniard here. No, it depends. The Castilles can be pretty silent/quiet/calm compared to Andalusia and the Eastern coast.

Oh that's interesting.

Do you (or: do people usually) exclude Madrid from Castilla? That's the only place in Spain I've lived and would not class the people I knew as quiet and calm. But then again it's a melting pot of people from all over Spain, so who knows!

And the calmest and quietest people I met were from the east coast :D

Definitely agree about Andalusia though

Well, Madrid it's a melting pot and both a sinking hole where lots of population of Castille end there, and their mentality shifts OFC.

It's not the same having to live in a small town in Castile of <2000 people vs doing that the literal capital of Spain.

Each American men bears a hat with mouse ears and every American woman is dressed as Cinderella. They hear Disney music all the time while letting children to take selfies with them. Is a very strange place.

Or maybe I have a very stereotyped, very local experience that came from going mostly where all the other tourists go. and I'm wildly extrapolating from here about the rest of the country.

Maybe the older houses are the only available places to rent in some cities when you are young, because they are old and creaky, so still affordable. Does this mean that every Spanish family live in old, poorly insulated houses? Hem, not.

Is Madrid louder than London, Athens, new Dehli, Los Angeles or Pekin? I'm very skeptical about it. Big cities, sport events, bars and heavy traffic streets are just loud places, all around the world. Go where the drunkards join, you'll meet a lot of drunkards. Visit any small village in Castilla. Most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.

> But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.

Same in small white villages in Andalucía. That is because they are populated mostly by old people that spend their day in front of their TV and barely want to walk anywhere. But once every 30 minutes whole village is woken up by the local teenager, the scream of his moped echoing in all the narrow streets. And if some people are talking you bet they are all shouting at each other.

>it's maddening, I don't understand it

Costs less to build, sells for the same money, more profit made.

As someone who grew up in a commie block, I think density over a certain point just sucks.

Cities in southern Europe are generally denser than what the communists built and to me this is simply too much.

I remember staying in Bilbao and the garbage truck waking me up on each garbage day because its sound bounced back and forth between the walls and some genius thought it would be a good idea to have it do its run during the night.

Meanwhile back at home if it weren't for a construction site that propped up recently there would have been at least 70 meters to the building next to mine.