The historic Albaicin neighborhood of Granada, Spain, is fighting a difficult battle against graffiti vandals who find its whitewashed walls too attractive to leave alone, marking them with tags and poetic messages.
The Albaicin, along with the Alhambra looming above it are UNESCO Heritage sites, with deep ties to both the city’s centuries of Moorish rule and to the Spanish kings who ruled after them.
The graffiti recently got viral attention because of an Easter-week incident that was videoed and posted on social media. In it, a guide confronted a woman who was writing on the walls and asked her to stop; she refused and kept on writing.
Alain González, president of the Professional Association of Tourist Guides in Granada, told local daily Ideal that “This happened on Holy Saturday. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s happening every day in the Albaicín.”
City officials created two brigades to remove the graffiti from public spaces and buildings and allocated €300,000 for the project, which includes applying preventive treatments to make it harder to mark and easier to clean, but the graffiti have reappeared almost as soon as they are removed.
Unusually, the graffiti appears to be mainly the work of internal tourists, as most are written in Spanish.
