At a time when digitalization is presented as a tool to combat depopulation, a small municipality in Cáceres, Carbajo, has resorted to an image almost from another century to denounce its situation: carrier pigeons to protest its communication problems.
The initiative has come from the Carbajo City Council, whose mayor, Sergio Piris, promoted a symbolic protest with a release of doves to denounce that the Consistory had been unable to receive calls for more than a month, in addition to suffering recurrent mobile network outages.
The image has symbolic weight, but it also serves to focus on a broader debate: to what extent do connectivity problems persist in rural areas despite the improvement in coverage reflected in official data.
A protest with pigeons against lack of communication
The protest does not arise from an absolute lack of internet in the town, but from a specific situation of lack of communication denounced by the City Council after a change of operator, which would have left the Consistory without receiving calls for weeks.
With the action of the carrier pigeons, the municipality wanted to make an ironic statement about the need to resort to past methods to demand solutions to a very current problem.
The protest has transcended as a denunciation of the situation of small municipalities that, despite advances in digitalization, continue to report incidents in coverage, quality of service, or difficulties in real access to telecommunications.
And here an interesting paradox appears. Because the official data show a notable improvement in rural connectivity.
According to the latest Broadband Coverage Report from the Ministry for Digital Transformation, 5G coverage now reaches 80% of the rural population, compared to 26% in 2021.
The same report indicates that fixed coverage at gigabit speed reaches 84% of rural households, while global 5G coverage reaches 96% of the Spanish population.
That is to say, on paper Spain appears as one of the most advanced countries in connectivity, also in rural areas.
When Coverage Doesn't Always Equal Real Connectivity
But Carbajo's case introduces a nuance that also appears in institutional debates: one thing is the declared coverage and another is the effective service experience.
Even public documents have indicated that formal coverage may exist in a municipality and, even so, quality problems, areas without effective signal, or limitations for certain uses.
That is precisely the type of gap that the protest attempts to make visible: not so much a total absence of a network as problems of real access or continuity of service.
And it is there where the image of the carrier pigeons gains strength as a political and social symbol.