Much more than just advertising hoardings, Osborne's bulls are national symbols of Spain


29.07.04	see original article?
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Spanish landscape marked by the famous bulls
Having escaped a ban in 1994, the famous 'toros Osborne' are a national symbol..

Dominating hillsides, its black silhouette is a feature of the Spanish landscape. 14 metres high, these giant bull-shaped billboards are much more than giant advertisements, they have become a symbol of Spain itself, says the news agency AFP.

But while it may be difficult to drive around Spain today without encountering the famous Osborne bulls, they almost disappeared from Spanish roadsides in 1994 as a result of new road regulations designed to help cut accidents by removing ads from alongside the country's road network

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Osborne had already removed the wording "Sherry & Brandy" from the hoardings 6 years earlier, AFP says, because of a similar law, but benefited from a national movement of support when it was proposed that it should remove the billboards, first designed in 1956 by Manolo Prieto.

The region of Andalucia, where Osborne has its headquarters, even went as far as voting through a motion which classified the bulls as cultural heritage. The region of Navarra, in the north of the country, used the fact that it has its own statutes to simply say that it would not be applying the law.

In 1997, Spain's supreme court ruled that: "The bull has surpassed its initial status of advertising to become part of the countryside", thus ensuring the bulls' survival and meaning that they are the only form of advertising to be found alongside Spanish highways.

There are currently 92 bulls across the Iberian peninsular, AFP says, including in the Balearic Islands and the Canaries. "We don't intend to place any more", Claire Filhol, spokeswoman for Osborne, tells the agency, "unless a community asks us to. We rent the spaces from private individuals and take responsibility for all maintenance costs. They are repainted black every two years, for example"

These days you can find the bulls everywhere - on cups, t-shirts, on mobile phones and even on the cinema screen. Now truly a symbol of Spain, however, the bulls to have a certain polarising regional effect. There are none, for example, in Guipuzkoa or Biscay, autonomous Basque regions, and there is only one left in Catalunya, to the north east. And that one is regularly vandalised and was even completely destroyed by Catalan militants in 2002, AFP says, before being rebuilt from scratch.