This is one of those delightful little discoveries. Check out this building: a nice postwar brick apartment block with iron balconies and wooden shutters.

The tree, the street lamp, and everything to the right of the corner of the building is real. All the rest is trompe l'oeil. A blank wall has been skillfully transformed into windows, awnings, more buildings, and blue sky.

Now let's pull back.

Aw crap! Ignorant little mouth-breathers destroyed this charming work with meaningless scrawling. Others came along and put even more graffiti on top of the old. And someone posted bills on top of the spray paint. Makes me think murderous thoughts.

Madrid is a grittier city than Barcelona. Most Barcelonan spray-can delinquents confine their defacements to freeway retaining walls and roll-up steel security shutters. Not so in Madrid, where almost no wall is sacred. Even buildings along the Paseo del Prado have been tagged.

However, the deterrent of having graffiti artists create special images on security shutters still seems to work even in Madrid.

Wonderful, huh? Salvador Dali with a spray can. I think he would have loved it.