Uría reconstructs the Spanish tavern as a dense institution of popular sociability rather than the degraded moral environment imagined by hygienists, employers and reformers. Its iconic idea is multifunctionality: the tavern gathered conversation, political meetings, card games, songs, dances and everyday association within a setting whose informality made it difficult to reduce to formal organisational categories. The theoretical contribution lies in shifting attention from registered associations toward spontaneous, weakly formalised social relations, showing that popular life cannot be understood solely through institutions with explicit membership or statutes. Methodologically, Uría works historically through moral discourse, regulation and social documentation while reading against the grain of elite descriptions that cast tavern life as vice, disorder or alienation. The result is a model of informal publicness in which sociability is simultaneously voluntary, embodied and politically contested. The work bridges social history with urban sociology by demonstrating how ordinary commercial interiors can become crucial infrastructures of collective life.