Mortadelo and Filemón already run a pedestrian traffic light in Barcelona. The intersection between Treball and Concilio de Trento streets, in the Sant Martí neighborhood of Barcelona, and right in front of the Gabriel García Márquez public library, has the famous couple since this Saturday, alternating in giving or blocking the way for pedestrians. Green for Mortadelo, red for Filemón.
It is the first traffic light in the city whose silhouettes are those of the characters created by Francisco Ibáñez, a resident of the neighborhood, who died this year and who has an important editorial fund in this equipment.
His widow, Remedios Solera, his daughter Núria and the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, inaugurated the new icon at 11:08 in the morning, tearing off the institutional fabric that covered it. The first to appear was Philemon.
The Navarrese professor who had the idea and whose name is exactly the same as the artist also attended the nice ceremony.
He launched it on social media last August, and in a few hours it went viral. It reached 350,000 retweets.
The administration was unusually agile, and in just two months it has coordinated the family, the publishing house that publishes Ibáñez (Penguin Random House), the General Directorate of Traffic and the traffic light manufacturers.
The event brought together dozens of neighborhood residents, curious and already fond of the initiative.
Núria Ibáñez joked that for the day to have been complete the only thing missing would have been for the traffic light to have fallen on the head of a passerby, causing “a bump.” That would have been pure Ibáñez.
“The pedestrian is not going to mind having to wait if it is Filemón who stops him,” joked yesterday the teacher whose light bulb went off. The silhouettes alternate every forty seconds, with three more flashes of Mortadelo green before turning red (and Filemón).
Collboni celebrated that the idea soon became a popular cry and that, with such speed, “such a special and long-awaited day” had arrived for all Ibáñez fans.
Before the end of the year, three more pairs of Mortadelo and Filemón will be distributed at crossroads in Barcelona. One of them will be at the crossroads between Comte d'Urgell and Manso streets, where the Sant Antoni Sunday market is held, a mecca for thousands of fans of literature in general and comics in particular for decades; another will be on Gran Vía de les Corts Catalanes with Bac de Roda, very close to the Ibáñez home; and the last one at possibly the busiest intersection in the city, between Ronda de Sant Pere and Passeig de Gràcia.
The City Council decided to start installing these curious traffic lights in front of this library, because it has a large biographical collection dedicated to the artist, who also attended the inauguration of the facility.
In just a few months it has won numerous awards, including the best library in the world in 2023, and more recently the FAD architecture award. This Saturday it seemed to have become too small, full of readers in every corner. Many of them, from Mortadelo and Filemón.
