The sky is the limit

Pla de la Seu, Tar­rag­ona’s evoca­tive me­di­ae­val quar­ter and home to the city’s cathe­dral, at the start of July saw the re­turn of one of Cat­alo­nia’s most iconic cul­tural ac­tiv­i­ties, human tow­ers. As mak­ing human tow­ers, or castells as they are known in Cata­lan, takes large num­bers of peo­ple in close prox­im­ity, the last two sum­mers in Cat­alo­nia have been char­ac­terised by a dis­tinct lack of castells per­form­ing in squares around the coun­try be­cause of health re­stric­tions as­so­ci­ated with the coro­n­avirus pan­demic. In the pic­ture, one of the coun­try’s fore­most groups, the Castellers de Vi­lafranca, can be seen rais­ing a sin­gle col­umn, eight lev­els high, in front of Tar­rag­ona’s cathe­dral. Also per­form­ing on the same day were two other lead­ing groups, the Xi­quets de Tar­rag­ona, who this year are cel­e­brat­ing their 50th an­niver­sary, and the Colla Joves Xi­quets de Valls. As events in­volv­ing large num­bers of peo­ple re­turn after two years of health re­stric­tions, scenes like this will once again be­come com­mon around Cat­alo­nia, es­pe­cially as Cata­lan towns re­cover an­other sum­mer cul­tural tra­di­tion that has suf­fered dur­ing the pan­demic: the re­turn of the an­nual local fes­ti­val known as the festa major.

the eye