**6. Street Art in the Canido Neighborhood: The Recovery of a Historically Stigmatized Neighborhood in the City of Ferrol**

The neighborhood of Canido, together with those of Ferrol Vello, La Magdalena, and the now-disappeared Esteiro, form the origins of an enlightened 18th century city, which emerged after the new naval policy of Felipe V came into force in 1726 in Spain (Figure 4). Its choice as the capital of one of the three maritime areas of Spain, the north, marked the beginning of the construction of an arsenal and shipyards, the orthogonal neighborhoods of Esteiro (known as the "frame " by its perimeter), the New Community of the Magdalena, and a whole series of defensive infrastructures materialized in the bastioned wall of the city and in the castles and batteries built on the margins of a natural port—the Ferrol estuary—an area of high geostrategic value until the first third of the 20th century [68].

The neighborhood is located on the top of a mountain to the north of the city with which it shares its name, between the cove of the Malata and the Magdalena neighborhood to the south, while in the west, it joins the early naval center of the old quarter. After successive proposals for fortification of the square, the one presented by the military engineer Pedro Torbé in 1768 definitively integrated this poorly populated rural space within the boundaries of the departmental city, being protected by one of the 12 bastions, known as Canido or Santiago. As well as its strategic nature, due to its altitude and exposure to the estuary, the peripheral and limit value in the administrative level can be added, a value that would play an important role in the process of expansion of the city from 1939 at the end of the civil war.

**Figure 4.** Canido neighborhood in the city of Ferrol.

Early reports refer to the place or village of Canido, which presupposes its earlier agricultural beginning, whose imprint is still noticeable in the traditional housing of the neighborhood. The rural exodus, attracted by the naval activity, would gradually turn this space into an alluvial neighborhood, capable of maintaining a part-time agricultural activity—unlike the one in Esteiro, erected from a new plant to house the shipyard workers and their families—supported mainly by women, who would have the opportunity to enter the labor market in one of the industrial initiatives (food, pencils, and textiles) from the 1940s. The male workforce was mainly concentrated in the shipyards of Bazán and Astano and participated in an increasingly diversified industrial sector, which was almost always related to the sea. Among others, the net factory (DEFER), PYSBE (Fisheries and Dryers of Cod of Spain), the Peninsular timber factory, the Hispania pencils factory, Soaps Pucho and properly in Canido the Fenya (Naval and Artillery Electrical Fabrications), the Piñon manufacturing company, and Industrial Pencils (ILASA). The settlement of workers in the neighborhood contributed to changing its physiognomy, causing profound internal social changes that were supported by the development of a militant commitment and solidarity strategies, which strengthened the affective and identity ties and generated a strong sense of belonging. While the bonding sentiment developed, initiatives at a parish level emerged to combat a daily life marked by the struggle against the difficulties of wages, hunger, poverty, inhuman housing, both parents working, and children in the street [69].

Its peripheral physical and structural origin, the peculiarities of its growth and development, as well as the recurring crises that plagued the city and its region were also accompanied by processes of social exclusion and segregation, materialized in perceptible forms of urban fragmentation and marginality, sometimes loaded with negative connotations and stereotypes, which were, without a doubt, defense strategies of the most favored groups to justify the existing social inequalities within the framework of the prevailing developmentalism. Stereotypes that can still be seen in the sociocultural imaginary and that condition the perception that some inhabitants of the city of Ferrol have of the neighborhood in general and in particular of its limits with the Magdalena neighborhood. The conformation as a structural periphery is related to the process of devaluation of the area that led to the opening of the municipal cemetery—the Canido cemetery—in 1804 after more than 25 years of heated controversies between the local authority and the neighborhood. On the other hand,

the periphery, understood as a remote and disconnected space from the illustrated city, was favored with the opening of the street of San Eugenio in a north-south direction, which was immediately converted by citizens into the street of the dead and corresponds to the current street of La Coruña.

This fact, which responds to the implementation of sanitation budgets, was not isolated, as evidenced by the transfer or erection of new charitable welfare infrastructures in the open crossroads on the hillside, initiated with the opening of the new building of the charity hospital in March 1786, whose lands were acquired almost at the same time as those of the cemetery. Subsequently, this culminated with the nursery, the school for poor girls, the nursing home, and centers for social care and the company stores in the Dictatorship (1939–1975).

The presence of these institutions, together with the industrial enclaves, contained the prices of the abundant land and favored initiatives of private housing cooperatives—for example, the houses of the housing cooperative of Santa Cruz and, on a smaller scale, those of naval government officials, which were accompanied by the construction of the noncommissioned dwellings of the army at the door of Canido (currently Plaza de Canido, a newly created node) and by those built on the initiative of the Board of Trustees of Houses of the Navy for noncommissioned officers outside the entrance to Canido, extending the neighborhood to the east following the axis drawn by the old county road 646 and the newly built council housing. The emergence of these new promoters resulted in the emergence of new social upheavals and interior peripheries, degraded spaces located in the inner city, which in the past formed a periphery that was frozen in time [70] that materialized in an significant trade union and protest activity within the framework of specialized Catholic Action movements in the absence of democracy.

This construction fever began in the 1950s after the closure of the cemetery and fundamentally materialized in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. This resulted in the expansion of the neighborhood to the east, and also to the west, coming into contact with the old quarter, where a small, upper class garden city arose, which was interwoven with the buildings that rise up the hillside as the northern extension of the Magdalena neighborhood, especially after the transfer from the hospital to the new dormitory suburb of Caranza and the opening of sections of the diagonal project dedicated to Doctor Fleming.

The increase in housing stock was accompanied by the improvement and opening of new urban roads and resulted in a significant increase in the population, whose immediate consequences were manifested in the erection of the new parish of the Holy Cross, which closed on 13 October 2019 after 55 years of operation, and the creation of public educational institutions for children and the current primary school—the Canido Infant and Primary Education Center (the former Reyes Catolicos school)—and the subsidiary of the women's institute on the grounds of the former graveyard, along with other private initiatives, all of which was accompanied by the proliferation of small commercial and artisanal activities to meet the demand of new residents.

To delimit the neighborhood is difficult. The Madoz dictionary [71] and the History of Ferrol de Montero Aróstegui [72] both break the space up as part of the Magdalena neighborhood or the historic center. At this time, the limits proposed by the city council coincided in the southern part with the layout of the grid of the enlightenment.

In line with its expansion process and its socio-economic peculiarities, urban deterioration processes do not affect all internal sectors equally. They are located mostly in the areas adjacent to the early roads that converge in the Stone cross square, the main node of the old enclave (Atocha-Riego, Alegre, Insúa, Alonso López), a crossing that has become an iconiclandmark of the neighborhoo, in the surroundings of the Plaza de la Tahona, Muiño do Vento, and in the corral of Chapón, which contrast more, if possible, with the recent estate built on the site of the old Fenya or on the new avenue of the painter Pérez Parrallé. It is worth noting that we are currently helping with the launch of major, new housing developments in the neighborhood [73], which support the recent prominence of this space in the framework of a city in perpetual crisis, due to both the decrease in the number of people living there and an aging population. It has been listed as the oldest city in Spain according to 2018 data from

the Galician Institute of Statistics [74], since those over 64 represent 27.4% of the urban population, two points above the average of the region of Galicia (24.9%).

This is also felt when you see that Canido currently has the lowest average age of the old walled enclosure—45.4 years, only surpassed by two small districts located in the greater area outside the gates that develops on the axis traced along the road of Castile, the main (and until 1968 the only) communication route that links it to the state road network. The best neighborhood in Galicia [75], as was recently awarded by Galician Television, is the result and recognition of an important neighborhood action that has managed to combine the historical legacy, secular traditions such as the exaltation of nature in May - Los Maios -, the recovery of old icons that give it its own personality, such as the Chapon yard, the bulwark, or the public laundry, with the strength of identity and belonging ties, the result of a hard shared experience, to undertake a whole series of strategies that allowed the deterioration and abandonment initiated with the naval crisis of the late 1970s to be left behind. From an identity of resistance [76], collectively and jointly built during the dictatorship, the residents of Canido have managed to rebuild it through a project based on elements of their collective culture. Its objective is to implement a neighborhood project through different initiatives that combine the complaint and visibility of problems with actions aimed at the sustainable improvement of the living conditions of the inhabitants, the recovery of heritage and public spaces both from the environmental point of view and also for living side by side, and encouraging new buildings that attract and settle new residents who collaborate on the path of demographic recovery and in the process of economic revitalization.

There are many initiatives that have been carried out, among which we can highlight the second-hand market [77]; the flowery orchards of Canido [78] (in which the environmental component is combined with the principles of land Art, the Mercalegre art market [79]); and fundamentally the street art festival, Meninas de Canido, in which cultural activity has become an important local development strategy. With this, the neighborhood has been reborn as a neighborhood that tourists visit again and, above all, that neighbors can enjoy again; a neighborhood in which new small businesses are emerging, in which children go out to play in the street and in which adults meet again in the bars of the stone cross square to have a drink; and a neighborhood in which the neighbors no longer leave, but new ones arrive [80]. The increase of the neighborhood in a city that loses an average of 800 inhabitants in the last year (770 in 2018) supports this collective project, which we will analyze in depth in the following sections.

### *6.1. Las Meninas de Canido: the Art of the Museum on the Street*

Las Meninas de Canido is an artistic and cultural festival where image and sound take to the streets as a vindication of a living neighborhood in permanent transformation. Its origin dates back to 2008, when it arose as a complaint mechanism to the situation of deterioration in the Canido neighborhood in Ferrol, a neighborhood in which the population did not want to reside and where there was no business or investment.

The artist Eduardo Hermida was its promoter. According to Hermida, it hurt to see how the neighborhood he had grown up in was degrading. That is why, remembering his childhood when he painted the wall of one of the houses in his neighborhood with chalk, he decided to begin to capture art in its streets. For this, he chose one of his favorite painters, Velázquez, and among his works, he chose Las Meninas, because it is perhaps his most recognizable work.

His goal was twofold: on the one hand, with the color of the works, he wanted to give light to the facades—victims of abandonment, deterioration, or vandalism; and on the other, he sought to take art from museums to the street in order to offer free culture to people who had no means to visit a museum or go to a concert. This is how, in 2008, the colorful performance of the Meninas de Canido began. In that year, Eduardo Hermida invited a group of artists from diverse, new, and renowned trajectories to participate in a pictorial marathon that would last 12 hours. The idea was to represent the Meninas painting on the walls of degraded homes, as if they were a canvas. It was an activity buoyed by music and one in which the local residents played an active role by offering supplies to the participants. The municipality collaborated by donating the material for the realization of the paintings, and thanks to the successful day, the initiative was repeated in later years.

Over the years, the Meninas de Canido has become more popular both nationally and internationally, and its organizational model has changed.


**Figure 5.** (**a**) Unmasked Menina Shfir; (**b**) Menina of Infanta Margarita Lily Brik.

The festival takes place in early September, and the 2018 edition welcomed more than 100,000 visitors. Since its inception, more than 1200 artists have participated in it, some from Syria, Slovenia, Poland, Brazil, or Taiwan, which gives the neighborhood a universality. Along its streets, there are more than 300 pictorial works that can be enjoyed (Figure 6).

**Figure 6.** Meninas in the Canido neighborhood.

In addition, a mobile app known as VISUAR for IOS system and Visar Augmented Reality for Android mobiles have been created, through which information about the works can be obtained as well as some animations that can be seen by standing in front of them.

The festival has aroused interest in cities outside Spain, and Eduardo Hermida has given presentations in forums in Paris and Kiev. Other Spanish cities, such as Madrid, intend to develop a similar initiative in several districts, while other cities are also targeting chromatism. These include Cambre, with its Chromatic Mural Fest, or Carballo, with its initiative Breaking Down Walls with Paint (Figure 7). It has been shown that art has very positive effects, not only from the point of view of the physical improvement of neighborhoods but also of social valorization.

**Figure 7.** Murals in Carballo.
