Stickers on the traffic sign pole only: Almost every sticker is placed on the sign and pole, not on the wall. This shows that people choose “functional” urban furniture (traffic signs, poles, electrical boxes) as canvases rather than historic stonework.
Absence of stickers on the wall: The old stone wall (Arco de la Estrella) is visibly clean of stickers. This suggests active municipal maintenance and hygiene policies: stickers on heritage buildings are removed quickly to preserve the historical aesthetic.
Semiotics of control
Heritage walls = “protected space” (cultural value, preserved by institutions).
Traffic signs/poles = “liminal space” (not sacred, more tolerated as sites of subcultural expression).
This creates a hierarchy of acceptable surfaces: official walls are “sanitized,” while functional signs absorb bottom-up communication. The urban landscape is negotiated between top-down (authorities removing stickers from heritage) and bottom-up (youth, activists, subcultures) forces. The street sign becomes a concentrated node of countercultural expression precisely because it is less strictly protected.
Languages:
Spanish : Calle Arco de la Estrella : “Arco de la Estrella Street” .A heritage-oriented street sign in formal typography, part of the city’s official signage system.
Non-verbal official sign: Traffic sign (No left turn): universally recognizable symbol with no text. Its meaning is clear across languages, but here it has been visually modified with stickers.
Stickers (bottom-up interventions, multilingual):
NO A LA MINA ¡Defiende Cáceres! (Spanish) : political protest sticker against lithium mining.
Other stickers in English (LURDO, Monkey Crew, Rock), Spanish, and visual-only designs.
Some are graffiti-style tags, functioning more as symbols of identity than as legible text.
Lingscape
