Barcelona: Oppressive poLICE to stop people on the street who are improperly dressed - fines of up to about $700

Each year since 2004, Jacint Ribas has taken out his bicycle in March and, wearing nothing more than his salt-and-pepper hair, has pedalled it through the streets, opening the season for going undressed in public.

One year he was stopped by police 30 times and released again each time because he was not breaking the law.

''I do it to show that it's normal,'' said Mr Ribas, 62, a retired bank worker who is president of the Association for the Defence of the Right to Nudity.

The annual exercise began in 2004 because that was the year Barcelona City Council subsidised a brochure called Expressing Yourself in Nudity.

Illustrated with photos of ordinary citizens naked on the street, in the metro and in the city's parks, it affirmed that the law ''does not contain any article for sanctions against public nudity''.

It went on to say that the city respected ''the right of the citizenry to nudism'' and boasted that in 2003, no fewer than 7000 people volunteered to undress together in Barcelona.

It was a vast unclad art project organised by the American photographer Spencer Tunick, who had photographed massed nudes in New York, Melbourne, Sao Paolo and Santiago.

Neither Tunick nor the council brochure the following year set off a wave of public nudity. Asked how many Barcelonans took advantage of the law's liberalism, Mr Ribas sheepishly replied: ''Very few.''

But even so, the season for legal nudity may be drawing to a close. This year, a committee of the city council approved a draft resolution empowering police to stop people on the street who were naked or improperly dressed and to require them to cover themselves or face fines of up to about $700. The full council is expected to approve the measure this month.

A deputy mayor, Assumpta Escarp, said Tunick's art event (in which she did not take part) was ''an artistic expression''. ''It's another thing to visit the Sagrada Familia [Antoni Gaudi church] in a bikini.'' Barcelona had its nude beaches, she said, but nudity on the street was not an acute problem.

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Barcelona: Oppressive poLICE to stop people on the street who are improperly dressed - fines of up to about $700

Barcelona: Oppressive poLICE to stop people on the street who are improperly dressed - fines of up to about $700

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