Most likely, there is no one who has traveled the roads of Portugal in the last 20 to 30 years (whether as a driver or as a hanger) who has not come across the famous sticker of a woman in a cowboy hat on the back (or even the side) of any car.
A simple sticker of a young woman who generated a lot of “coffee conversations”, especially about her origins, a potential urban legend… Who would be the woman in the cowboy hat? — was the question in the minds of many Portuguese for decades.
Finally, we discovered the truth and… we saw the light. We know where the sticker came from and what it meant — we can now rule out the possibility of it being something from the tobacco industry (as I came to think…).
And it lasted, and it lasted...
The sticker that we still find today on some cars in circulation was a way of telling everyone that if he had been to the Penelope disco in Benidorm, Spain. Known as Penelope, the truth is that no one knows who the young woman who modeled the sticker was.
Nowadays she can't be that young anymore, this symbol was created by a bohemian artist in… 1968! And it has remained unchanged ever since.
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Yeah, the Penelope disco, whose symbol is the famous woman in a cowboy hat that appears on the sticker, is already 51 years old even today you can visit it (and maybe buy the sticker).
Interestingly, most people are more likely to know the mysterious but famous symbol of the club than the club itself.
As you would expect, being of Spanish origin, the phenomenon of the Penelope sticker is not a Portuguese exclusive, and in Spain it was (according to El País) the second most popular car sticker, just behind the famous Bull of Osborne which is almost a hallmark of Spain.