I just returned from Spain and one thing I always noticed was the obsession to spray everything, but this time it was different. I drove from Bilbao to Girona past Barcelona and literally every bridge, wall, building seemed to be covered with graffiti. Even in villages and smaller towns, street lights are marked, benches too and people don't seem to paint their houses anymore as it would be covered in graffiti (not the nice type).
I just googled Spain Graffiti Problem and a video popped up, it seems this guy in the video noticed the same last year.

He's a bit annoying saying guy all the time, but it was exactly what I had seen now. Do you notice this in your areas?

We have it in our area, but its mainly done by a couple of legit street artists.

Had to laugh at the picture though...
TAG got to be an in joke as a tag is the artwork that identifies the artist (in my drawings I hide a representation of my hallmark from when I was a Jeweller)
I like it and it should be encouraged, or at least they should be given a space in which to do this.
One of the more common 'tags' here is a yellow chick which appears on walls, cabinets and bus shelters...

But to me, Spain just seems to be catching ip with the rest of the world, 20 plus years ago, every bridge or wall in London had street art.
Brighton has some impressive walls, and the telephone and internet cabinets are glorious..

Theres tons in Valencia and people go there just to look at it...
I have a friend who is quite well known around here and his work is all over the place (he is a sculptor) and you can find his 'art' on walls, bins and along the seafront between Albir and Altea..
Some of his pieces sell for thousands.....

This is his stuff, he now lives in Valencia...
​​​​​​https://euroweeklynews.com/2021/01/3...th-street-art/

If it's art OK, in our part of Ireland we have things like this.


In the video it's far from street art:-), more like vandalism. This is what I have seen everywhere.

Yes compared to when I first came to Spain (2000) I would say the amount of graffiti has increased.

As has been said, most of what can be seen is vandalism & hopefully anything that those who do it own in the future will get covered in it by other village idiots.

Our town council has put up graffiti walls, it seems to have worked.

When I saw the thread title I thought we were talking about pesticides!

Actually I suppose we are - pest - icides!

Graffiti is a scourge, a curse. In our street 3 renewed shop fronts were defaced last week, only days after the work was carried out (to add to the rest of the graffiti vandalism which degrades & cheapens our property).

True and spraying could have many meanings😉. On a serious note, I do feel for all these people as they make an effort to keep the area nice and the next day it's just destroyed. Even in the video vans were marked. I was actually walking a coastal walk and went down to a small cove, even here people had covered natural rocks with ugly scribbling. It has always been present in larger cities and especially in France, Belgium I remember always seeing plenty of ugly scribbling, it's just that now you even see it in small villages. This combined with cigarette butts, dog poo and litter just makes me
You'd even think that fewer people now smoke and there are ideas to replace old filters with biodegradable ones, still a long way to go. At least the sun dries the poo so it's not so bad.

Spanish parents don't seem to see this type of destructive behaviour by their children as a problem. When we lived in our old house a boy who lived further up the street tagged the side wall of the house in big black letters, not long after we'd painted it. He was thick enough to write his own name! So I went up to complain to his parents, and of course he said it wasn't him until I pointed out he still had the marker pen he'd used in his hand (and had also written his name on the front of his own house). The parents looked at me blankly as if to say what are you bothered about. People also don't seem bothered enough by it to paint over it or scrub it off their property. Somebody else tagged the electricity meter box door on my house and I scrubbed it off immediately, but there are so many where people have just left it.

It seems to go in waves in our town. One or two kids go through a phase of tagging everything in sight and you see the results everywhere. Then when they grow out of it there is a respite for a while until a couple of new ones take up the mantle. At the moment we seem to be in a bit of a respite phase and there isn't too much of it around. One of the worst places I've seen in Spain for it is Granada city, even on some historic buildings right in the centre there is tagging everywhere and just outside the centre every surface is covered. Not nice.

We used to go to neighbourhood meetings where representatives of the Ayuntamiento and the Jefe de Policia Local would be there to supposedly respond to people's concerns. We raised the problem of graffiti and other types of vandalism and the response was a lukewarm "the police can't be everywhere". When we suggested that CCTV cameras around the town which are commonplace in other countries could help identify the culprits and perhaps act as a deterrent, which would save the Ayuntamiento and taxpayers money in having to repair damage, both the officials and most of the Spanish neighbours in attendance were horrified by the idea, it seems to be alien to their culture and they don't want it. So the problems carry on unchecked.

We met this guy in malaga last year, hes the same in real life

Spray paint their phones and devices & see how they howl!