The final act of La Mercè, at least from our perspective, was the Human Towers Festival, an event as spectacular as it was alien to Sarah and me. According to the festival’s program, two of the best tower groups in all of Catalonia are invited by the Barcelona Human Tower Group for this exhibition. This year’s invitees were the Minyons from Terrassa and the Castellers of Vilafranca, a group famous enough to have earned their own page on Wikipedia.
Sarah and I made our way to Plaça de Sant Jaume along with a classmate of hers to witness the proceedings. Like Correfoc the night before, the plaza was packed to agoraphobia-inducing levels. This did not stop Sarah from once again squeezing through spaces in the crowd that a mouse would have a hard time jamming through, but recalling the awe of the spectacle the night before I swallowed any inclination to complain and happily followed her into the square just in time to see the Castellers de Vilafranca dismantling one of their constructions. The three of us managed to squeeze against a wall and witness the next group build their tower.
Construction is very deliberate, as one would imagine an effort of this sort would be. The teams are enormous as one look at the group photo on the Castellers’ Wikipedia page will confirm. This is done so that the towers have the necessary base, called the pinya or bulk in English, comprised of several hundred people, apparently. Depending upon the tower formations used, a second and even a third base is sometimes built on top of the pinya. The cool part, from an outsider’s perspective anyway, is when the teams begin building the upper portions of the towers.
From the mass of humanity one sees people climbing one another, building the castle up quite a few stories, until the final casteller reaches into the air with four fingers extended, indicating the tower has been capped. Then, it’s back down again; if the team manages to fully assemble and disassemble the tower in an orderly fashion the attempt is called descarregat. A tower that is built to the top but falls during the disassembly stage is carregat. Any tower that does not reach the final stage is called intent, which is about the only word that makes sense to me. Catalan is a VERY foreign language. I trolled the web looking for original source material on this sport in English but those pages are sadly nowhere to be found. Wikipedia does have a good article on the sport, though, and the links in Catalan appear to be working so it is at least a good jumping-off point for those adventurous enough to attempt to feed the outward links through a translator.
Sarah, her classmate and I stayed for the construction of four towers before we decided that the crush of humanity was just too great. While it might have been fun to see a few more towers being built the truth is that it was a warm day and the sun was just beginning to bathe the enormous assembly in its light; I am pretty sure it got mighty uncomfortable in the plaza by around 1:30 in the afternoon. But we caught some great tower building, got some great pictures (at least up until the point where it became impossible for me to hold the camera up comfortably) and Sarah got some great footage of two of the castells being built (I’ll share the footage with you in the next installment in an attempt to keep this upload from being unbearably huge).
