Simon Hunter
A HIGH school in Barcelona has taken legal action after offensive graffiti against foreigners and ‘posh’ people has repeatedly appeared on its walls.
The Barcelona High School, which is a private institution with two centres in the Gracia neighbourhood of the Catalan capital, has filed two reports with City Hall claiming that the slogans constitute a hate crime.
The messages included ‘f*ck pijos’, a Spanish word used offensively and that could be translated as ‘posh people’, as well as ‘putos pijos’ (f*cking posh people), and ‘guiris go home’, a message that used a word for northern Europeans, particularly the British, and that is considered by some to be offensive.
According to a report in Spanish daily El Pais, these slogans are regularly daubed on the walls in areas of Barcelona that are particularly hard hit by high levels of tourism, but it is unusual for them to be denounced as a hate crime.
Read more: Anti-tourism graffiti brands tourists a ‘plague’ in Spain’s Sevilla
“We have filed two complaints, one last Friday and one this Tuesday, because we have two campuses and there are acts of vandalism on both of them,” Usman Gil, the school’s services coordinator, told El Pais.
Gil also explained that the elite school, which costs around €1,500 a month per student, has filed complaints about the graffiti before but has received little response either from the council or the authorities.
“Their response is that they cannot do anything, maybe a fine if they catch them, but that’s it,” he said.
“In the end these people get what they want, which is attention,” he added.
Hate crimes can be punished in Spain under the Criminal Code, and carry with them fines ranging from €150 to €3,000.
This year has seen a rise in anti-tourism graffiti across Spain, as visits to Spanish destinations continue to break new records, putting the local population under pressure due to issues such as gentrification, rising property costs and antisocial behaviour.
Just this week graffiti appeared in Sevilla branding tourists a ‘plague’, and an activist group from the same southern Spanish city tweeted out an AI image of a rat in a message that compared visitors to the rodents.
