The City Council of l'Hospitalet de Llobregat has replaced eight traffic signs in the Santa Eulàlia neighborhood that were only in Catalan with bilingual ones, which also speak Spanish, after the complaint by the president of Catalan Civic Coexistence (CCC), Ángel Escolano, who lives in the second city of Catalonia.
Escolano took the case before the contentious administrative court, but it was not necessary to wait for the ruling. Municipal sources assume that with the law in hand Escolano was right and the changes he demanded have been made, thus avoiding a battle in court.
According to Consistory sources, the municipal legal service assumed that the traffic law is legally "above" a report from the Generalitat of Catalonia that stated that it could be labeled in Catalan. Without going to trial, they add, they manage to "gain time" without there being a ruling that could create a precedent that affects all signals. In the meantime, they want to find a solution.
The rest of the signs in the Barcelona town continue in Catalan, but CCC warns that it wants to go "for all the signs" in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat and the rest of the Catalan municipalities.
The linguistic crusade in l'Hospitalet started in 2017 with a motion presented by Cs with the support of the PP that demanded changes to municipal signage. The PSC gave partial support. Subsequently, the case came to court with CCC, which has now claimed victory.
The current replacement affects eight signs from Escolano's house to the Ciutat de la Justícia, where he goes to work because he is a lawyer. "Little battles that if we all do, they will make us win the war," the lawyer said through social networks.
In this way, the CCC leader calls on citizens to report cases like this. The entity has offered to cover the legal costs of all actions carried out along these lines.
For Escolano, the offensive against traffic signs in Catalan in l'Hospitalet is a "defense" of their linguistic rights which, according to him, have been "trampled by the totalitarian regime of the Catalan separatists."
