From the window of her tin-sided shop outside El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, Esmeralda Quintanilla watches artists get to work on walls pockmarked by bullet holes from the country’s civil war and gang conflict.
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Armed with brushes, paint and spray cans, muralists and graffiti artists have already covered the walls of several of the 40 five-storey units in a housing complex in Zacamil, a neighbourhood in the city’s Mejicanos district.
“With the murals, everything looks really nice,” says Quintanilla, a 55-year-old seamstress who has lived in the neighbourhood nearly half her life.
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“You start to see all this and it gives the place a different image. I feel really happy, proud,” she adds.
