Is illegality a legitimate form of resistance? The turn of the 20th century and the 2008 financial crisis forced Spanish architects to search for new and urgent architectural narratives to deal with while the productive (and obsolete) city model. As response, in the last decade emerged architectural interventions on the borders of legality, which paradoxically adopt plastic languages belonging to the XX Century. In this brief article it is argued how contemporary forms of resistance, despite its plastic language, manifest a renovated and eminently pragmatic spirit in which illegality is an often-needed step.