LUNA SILVA MACBA SKate QUEEN.

In January of 2026, I took my annual sabbatical from life in Indiana and flew to Barcelona. I wanted to spend some time there partly because it’s one of my favorite places on earth, but also because it’s home to one of the most iconic skate spots in the world. It’s called MACBA, more officially known as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. For decades, skateboarders have gathered here from all over the world to skate its smooth marble entryway and the ledges surrounding it.

You can walk past it at almost any time of day and see forty or fifty people skating or watching. I thought it would be a great place to kick off work for another project I’m working on called Cairo Underground.

After a brief introduction, Luna — who was skating with her friend Patryck from Poland — was kind enough to chat with me about what brought her to Barcelona, why skating is so important to her, and the value she finds in living a life that intentionally weaves exercise, fun, and sun into her daily routine.

Growing Up.

Luna Silva didn’t grow up anywhere near a skatepark. She grew up on a small island off the coast of Chile — the kind of place where the population is basically her family plus whoever’s fixing the generator that week. Her German grandfather bought the island in the 1950s, which sounds like it could be a setup to a Wes Anderson movie, but for Luna it was just home.

Her childhood was a mix of beachcombing and horseback riding. She spent hours looking for arrowheads left behind by the island’s Indigenous people, a very different kind of treasure hunt than the one she does now — loose hardware, lost Allen keys, someone’s phone that slid under a ledge. She learned to ride horses early, really early, and her family has been raising polo horses for decades. They’re one of the top horse families in the world, which is a funny sentence to write, but it’s true.

If you’re looking for the secret to her skating, it’s probably somewhere in there. Growing up around animals that cost more than most cars teaches you things: balance, patience, timing, and how to stay calm when something with muscles the size of your torso decides to do whatever it wants. Compared to that, learning a kickflip is basically a polite conversation.

The Fun is the Point.

Skateboarding didn’t show up until 2021. Luna was working as a physical therapist — or more accurately, trying to find work as a physical therapist. After enough job hunting to qualify as a personality trait, she decided she’d rather do something fun on purpose. So she picked up a skateboard. That was it. No dramatic backstory, no childhood dream — just a clean pivot into a life that made more sense.

She’s not coasting on her family’s horse empire either. She’s building her own thing, one scraped elbow at a time.

When she first stepped on a board, she was hooked by the energy and the people. Skateboarding has a way of making strangers feel like teammates, and Luna fell right into that rhythm. Moving to Barcelona was the logical next step. For a skater, it’s like a math nerd moving to Boston just to be closer to MIT. Except instead of chalkboards and equations, you get MACBA — the plaza that’s part Mecca, part proving ground, part accidental film set. Michael Jordan even stopped by last year, which tells you everything you need to know about its gravitational pull.

Now Luna is part of the daily MACBA ecosystem. She skates with people who shaped the culture, including Tom Penny — the British legend whose style made half the 90s look cooler than it had any right to. When I met her briefly in early 2026, she had that mix of calm and drive that usually comes from people who grew up around high‑stakes animals and wide‑open spaces.

She hasn’t been skating for decades, but she’s committed in a way that makes time irrelevant. Some people grow into skateboarding. Luna arrived with the wiring already installed.