The Plenary of the Santa Cruz de La Palma City Council has unanimously approved a motion from Nueva Canarias–Bloque Canarista to install a uniform system of QR codes on the city’s street signs.
The Plenary of the Santa Cruz de La Palma City Council has given the green light, with no votes against, to the installation of QR codes on the city’s street signs. The initiative, driven by the municipal group of Nueva Canarias–Bloque Canarista, aims to turn every corner into a digital gateway that offers historical, commercial, and service information.
A Digital Welcome for Cruise Passengers
Santa Cruz de La Palma is a cruise port, and each season thousands of visitors disembark with little time to explore the city. The motion seeks to ensure that these tourists find an interactive guide on their own mobile devices as soon as they step onto the street. The QR code system will allow access to the history of each street, iconic buildings, and corners with architectural heritage, all with a simple scan.
The councillor from Nueva Canarias, Maeve Sanjuán Duque, explained that the idea is for the street signs to function as "a digital gateway for welcome, orientation, and cultural and commercial promotion." A model that, as she recalled, many cities are already adopting within the concept of Smart Cities.
“With an optimized QR system on the city’s street signs, we can turn simple signage into a tool for tourist, commercial, cultural, accessibility, and promotional information, positioning Santa Cruz de La Palma as a city that looks to the future.”
Local Commerce and Popular Festivals, Also in the Code
The proposal is not limited to monumental heritage. Each code will include information about local commerce: cafés, craft shops, and nearby markets. Additionally, content about the city’s traditional festivals, such as la Bajada de la Virgen or Los Indianos, will be incorporated, aiming for visitors to take away an emotional memory of the place.
For residents, the system will also have practical utility. The codes will provide accessibility data, such as the slope of the street or the proximity of banks and urban elevators, as well as safety and emergency information, with quick access to police and health centre phone numbers. Everything will be translated into several languages to facilitate use for those who do not speak Spanish.
Augmented Reality and Video for Mobile
The approved motion details how the code itself should be: a clear call to action — such as “scan to discover the history” — multilingual content, fast loading, and mobile-optimized format, with brief texts and visual support. The technology will even allow for the incorporation of videos and augmented reality, with historical reconstructions of the streets or old photographs overlaid on the current image, an extra that could also go viral on social media.
Santa Cruz de La Palma thus joins a trend that has already been seen in several municipalities on the island. Los Llanos de Aridane approved placing plaques with QR codes that collect the biographies of the people after whom their streets are named, and Villa de Mazo launched its own tourist street guide of the urban area. The capital of La Palma now takes a further step, with a system that aspires to be comprehensive and modern.
For now, the motion does not set a specific installation schedule or the exact date of the plenary session, but the City Council is already working on the technical specifications to tender the project. Residents and merchants of Santa Cruz de La Palma can expect that, in the coming months, the streets will start to speak for themselves.
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