For a few months now, I've been looking forward to checking the mailbox again. Sometimes I stand in front of it and open it. Other times, I glance at it with the hope of finding what I'm waiting for. There are days when it even plays tricks on me and makes me believe that what I'm waiting for has already arrived, and when I open it, I only find a bill or a рекламный leaflet. The people responsible for me suddenly having this "dependence" on the mailbox – until a few days ago I didn't know this could happen to me – are the illustrator Laura Agustí (Teruel, 1980) and the photographer Arnau Sidera (Vic, 1985).

Technology, new consumption habits and changes in the ways we relate have ushered postal mail into a new era. For the first time, in 2025 in Spain, more packages than letters were sent, according to the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC). Globally, postal sector revenues are rising.

"Submitting the documents for regularization is the first step to being able to continue growing here with stability and calm." This is how Xavier, from Venezuela, explains the opportunity that regularization as an asylum seeker would mean for him. In front of the Post Office in Plaça del Doctor Letamendi in Barcelona – enabled for in-person processing since this Monday – the 31-year-old explains that he has already managed to submit all the documentation. Xavier arrived in Spain almost a year ago and, once settled in the Catalan capital, sees the approval of extraordinary regularization as another step to continue working without having to worry about his papers. A process he undertook alone. "You have to read everything very well and bring the necessary documents, but in my case it has been quite easy and quick," says Xavier.

While most authorized Post Offices are attending without remarkable incidents and by strict prior appointment migrant people who can carry out the paperwork regularization in person since this Monday, long queues are multiplying in the services that the 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 have opened. The delay in the publication of the required documents has meant that today the bulk of the 150,000 beneficiaries estimated for Catalonia are still pending to collect all the necessary documentation.In L'Hospitalet, the queue goes around the enormous La Farga building, where the social vulnerability report and the municipal population register certificate are processed. The City Council expects to attend to 1,500 people today out of the 27,000 who already live in the municipality. The first applicants began to arrive before 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, three-quarters of those of us who are here today would already have the report," they lament, without being sure that officials can respond to everyone in the queue today.

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).