• The Galician Banksy that triumphs without painting graffiti

There are big cities like London that declare war on graffiti and pursue it relentlessly. And there are small big cities like La Bañeza that yield their walls to urban art and decide to turn their streets into an explosion of color, culture and social vindication.

We have had to come to the Leonean moor to see a long thirty artists in action, perched on the cranes and protected by masks, who have chosen this city as canvas, which has become a world reference in urban art. Today concludes the seventh edition of Art Aero Rap , and the Bañeza - something more than 10,000 inhabitants - will once again presume to be the city with the most murals per capita in Spain.

Of course, with the permission of Penelles, Fanzara, Ordes, El Provencio, Castrogonzalo, Carvallo, Romangordo, Fresnedillas de la Oliva and a long gorge of villages that are making street art ( rural version ar t) their main claim.

"The villages were emptied because they tried to convince us that full and happy life was in the cities," says Asier Vera, a San Sebastian artist based in El Bierzo. "Now it's the people who claim us because they are emptying and street art is a sign of life."

Asier is the author of some of the most emblematic murals of recent years in La Bañeza, de la Justicia is not blind to Awake . "I started like many, making lyrics, " he recalls. "I saw a clean wall and was screaming for me to do something with it ... I took risks because I played at that age. But I realized that by graffiti nobody looked at me, and that's why I jumped into the murals."

Now it is the people who claim us because they are emptying and street art is a sign of life

Asier

In La Bañeza there is no such abrupt and artificial border between legal and "illegal" walls. "Here are the people who ask us to paint the walls because they see the result of all these years in other parts of the city," says Toño Muela s, organizer of Art Aero Rap, which in 2013 collected the witness of the old sessions of "graffiti jam" and elevated them to another dimension.

There we have the mural "I choose", by Uruguayan Fitz Licuado (Florencia Durán), selected by Street Art USA as one of the ten most impressive murals in the world in 2018. Florence, 32, has returned this year to La Bañeza on her own merits and in her new and gigantic mural a woman can be seen again, showing this time both breasts, in a reaffirmation of female empowerment.

In the same building, but on another wall, Galician Lidia Cao handles the crane with such skill as the spray, while also taking shape of the silhouette of another woman and the reflection of her dark part (that is, her shadow) in her very personal large-scale contribution "against urban feism".

Women are raising the bar year after year, and there we have Raquel Rodrigo , in front of the imposing portrait in one of the central squares of La Bañeza, elaborated with cross stitch and with the participation of more than thirty local volunteers. "The artists are serious people and in this city we have found all the encouragement and support that urban art needs," says Raquel, at the head of the Arquicostura studio, with works in Paris, Manchester and Valencia.

In La Bañeza there is no such abrupt and artificial border between legal and 'illegal' walls

Our Lady of the Boats opens in the meantime as a diptych in the municipal pediment, signed by El Rojo, co-author of the other of the most visited murals, in memory of Angel Nieto: "To be world champion, you must first run in the urban circuit of La Bañeza ".

The city of Leon always had some "crossroads", as José Luis del Riego, the Councilor for Culture who proudly boasts of how Art Aero Rap has catapulted La Bañeza towards the 21st century, recalls the witness of the historic Motorcycle race or the mythical Carnival. For Antonio Odón , something like the cultural soul of the city, urban art connects with the poetic and musical tradition of a city that is reinventing itself against all odds: "Now that there is so much talk about empty Spain, here we are learning to fill it. "

Romangordo's trapntojos

Romangordo (Cáceres)

Trampantojo: pictorial technique that tries to fool the eye by playing with the architectural environment. In Romangordo (Cáceres) the ancient technique has reached a new dimension with the corner of the donkey, the cow at the door, the harvest, the chicken coop or the countrymen sewing baskets, which seem so real that one could almost touch them.

The picturesque town of 250 inhabitants, at the gates of Monfragüe, has taken on new life and has become a point of tourist and cultural interest (25,000 visitors so far this year) thanks to the trapntojos painted by Jesús Mateos Brea, Jonatan Carranza and David Bravo. The tradition that has turned Ramongordo into a forced stop on the "rural art" route has lasted for four years.

The next step is the murals with a more urban air, like the one that Jesús Mateos Brea paints at the entrance of the town, with his mother's face and the message of gender equality. Jesus, 36, began making his first steps in Plasencia as a graffiti artist, and from there he jumped into figurative art, from engravings to murals.

"I still remember the frustration created by the lack of spaces," recalls Jesus. "Many muralists come from that world and we have felt the adrenaline of the" mission "and the emotion of the first" pieces. "Over time, this has become my job and a job as hard as rewarding, eight or ten hours a day on a crane and in full sun. "

Jesús and Jonatan team up and continue to illustrate in their own way the past and future of Ramongordo, in full cultural renaissance with its route of the trapntojos, the house of aromas or the ecomuseum of Uncle Cáscoles.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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