Ronda Travel Forum

I was in Ronda this summer, and I wanted to ask...

Why do the signs say "STOP" on them?! Why don't they have it in Spanish? I met only 4 people in Spain who spoke English, and yet their stop sign is in English!

Road signs in Europe adhere to an international standard and look the same everywhere.

Unlike "stop", the "one way" sign changes from country to country: for example, in Italy they have "senso unico" on them.

But, admittedly, the newer ones only have the long white arrow on blue background, with no words.

I think they're trying to standardise road signs throughout the EU such that when you drive from one country to another, there is little risk of confusion. That would seem the logical answer. But then you see anomolies like the highway signs in Italy being green and the ones in France being blue and you end up on the highway when you didn't really want to! :-))

One other thing that I don't get is roundabouts. You're supposed to give way to people who are already on the roundabout (i.e. people coming from your left, on continental Europe anyway). But this is apparently a new concept in some countries as the "give way to the right at a junction" rule applies traditionally. And if the roundabout is NOT clearly marked as a roundabout (a round blue sign with three arrows in a circle) the old rule still applies. I learnt all this fairly recently when I had to re-sit my drivers test in Italy as I couldn't convert my foreign drivers licence.

Green is the new standard for highways, blue for other main roads, white for local roads. French road authorities seem to be lagging behind.

Stop has been stop in Sweden looooong before EU was heard of. It's simply internationalised road rules where stop is considered the most important one to follow I guess.

Always annoys me since the Swedish word would be the same but with only an additional "p" i.e. "stopp". How difficult is that. Stop in Swedish is something I drink beer out of :)))

Hah hah, that's funny. I can imagine you thinking of beer every time you get to a Stop sign. Actually, thinking about it, there are some STOP signs in Italy that say "ALT" but usually not on major roads if I recall correctly.

Then again, maybe it's because they only want English speaking tourists to stop!!!

:)

Why not leave them blank... as everyone knows what the red hexagon means?