While most designated Post Office branches are attending to migrants who can regularize their papers in person since Monday without notable incidents and by strict prior appointment long queues are multiplying in the services that city councils have set up to speed up mandatory procedures. Since Thursday the 16th, applications can also be made online, but it is this Monday that in-person procedures opened. The delay in publishing which documents are required has meant that today the bulk of the 150,000 beneficiaries calculated to be in Catalonia are still pending to collect all the necessary documentation.At the municipal citizen service office in L'Hospitalet, the queue goes around the enormous La Farga building, where the social vulnerability report and the municipal register are processed. The first applicants began to arrive after midnight this Sunday. The sisters Sandra and María, Colombians who have resided in the city for three years and seven months, have been waiting since 4 in the morning. "If they had told us from the beginning that we needed the vulnerability report, three-quarters of those who are here today would already have it," they lament, without being sure that today officials can respond to everyone in the queue.

Neither Joan, nor Miquel, nor Paula, but neither Josep nor Montserrat. None of them practice what the English writer Virginia Woolf called "the most human art": writing letters by hand and sending them. Or at least not regularly. In fact, Joan, 23, hasn't done so since she was in school, when she shared some letters with other students from the State as part of an educational project. "I don't remember the name of the town, but I know we wrote and sent letters to other children through the postal service. After that, I'd say I haven't sent any more," she explains, crunching her memory. However, the truth is that using a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a stamp, as well as one's hands, to write and send a few words to someone can almost be considered an exception. In Spain, 80% of the population says they will not have used traditional postal service—sending a letter or postcard—at any point in 2024.

They have named them as Equality Stamps, but Correos' supposedly anti-racist advertising campaign has turned out so badly that its good intentions have been read as a reaffirmation of the structural racism it wants to fight. Coinciding with the European Month of Diversity and the first anniversary of the murder of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis, the state company has put into circulation a collection of stamps imitating different skin tones, and increasing their price as they become lighter. The result is that the stamp of less value (0,70 euros) is the darkest and in progression the most expensive is the lightest (1,60 euros).