Barcelona graffiti removal efforts intensified throughout 2025. Municipal cleaning crews removed an average of 360 graffiti tags, posters, and banners every single day. According to new data, the City Council carried out approximately 119,000 cleaning interventions between January and November. This highlights the immense scale of the maintenance operation required to keep the Catalan capital’s facades clean.

Figures obtained by the Catalan News Agency (ACN) from the Directorate of Cleaning Services show crews attended over 30,000 distinct postal addresses. The data paints a picture of a relentless, often repetitive struggle to maintain public spaces. This was particularly evident in the historic city centre.

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Barcelona Graffiti Removal: Historic Centre Bears the Brunt

The district of Ciutat Vella, home to the Gothic Quarter and El Raval, accounted for nearly 30% of all cleaning interventions. It remains the epicentre of the issue, followed by Sant Martí (12%) and Gràcia (11.3%). Therefore, these three areas represent more than half of the city’s entire graffiti removal workload.

While the removal of unauthorised posters and banners is part of the service’s remit, scrubbing paint from walls dominates their schedule. In the first nine months of the year, 75% of all actions were specifically dedicated to erasing graffiti. This intense workload for city employees comes amid the Barcelona City Council’s recent landmark agreement with municipal unions to reduce working hours.

A Sisyphean Task: The ‘Black Spots’

The data highlights a significant issue with recurrence—cleaning the same specific walls over and over again. In 60% of the addresses visited, crews had to return more than once. However, some locations require near-constant attention.

Officials identified around thirty “black spots” where teams intervened between 100 and 600 times in just 11 months. The most notorious location was a section of the Passeig Marítim in Barceloneta. One specific spot on the seafront promenade required 592 separate cleaning interventions—averaging nearly two visits per day.

Other high-frequency targets included Plaça Castella and Carrer del Doctor Aiguader in Ciutat Vella, and Plaça del Diamant in Gràcia.

Citizen Complaints on the Rise

While the council’s brigades are proactive, residents are increasingly vocal about the state of their streets. The number of formal requests for graffiti removal via the city’s ‘IRIS’ complaint system has surged.

In 2023, the city registered just over 2,100 such requests. By October 2025, that figure had skyrocketed to over 11,000. This sharp rise suggests a growing public intolerance for visual clutter and vandalism. Alternatively, it may indicate greater awareness of the digital tools available to report it. The focus on vandalism is one of the other pressing urban challenges facing Barcelona’s municipal government, alongside issues like homelessness.

Despite the high volume of work, 2025 was not the busiest year on record. Comparing the January to September periods, interventions were up by 12.8% compared to 2024. However, they remained lower than the peak levels seen in 2023.

The vast majority of cleaning efforts (45%) focus on building facades. Meanwhile, crews also regularly scrub streetlights (13%), utility cabinets (9%), and infrastructure walls (5.7%). This reactive cleaning work runs in parallel with other municipal initiatives aimed at improving city services and sustainability, such as a successful school food reuse program. For more information on urban maintenance strategies, you can read about global approaches to graffiti management.

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