When trying to hitch out of Lleida in Catalonia, I ran into what I like to call a directional mishap. This was before the age of cell phones and Lleida didn’t warrant a map in the Lonely Planet guidebook. You know things aren’t going well when you’re using the sun as a reference point, so I eventually found the river which I definitely pointed north.

Up to this point, my European adventures had been a steady diet of old churches, museums, even older churches, more museums, and a castle (the main attraction in Lleida is both a church and a castle). I was looking to shake up my travels a bit with an ill planned hitch to Andorra, but the most incredible part of the day happened here on the edge of the city, where the standard graffiti gave way into an endless collage of murals, some amazing, some terrifying, but all of them in some ways interesting.

This was the first time that I shot some street art with my camera – a Canon ELPH with a startling 8MB of pixel power. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would lead to a 15 year obsession traveling to the lost places and hidden treasures of Europe. Now in 2020, I’ve remastered some of the photos from the original trip. Enjoy!

Sticking it to the man