Catalonia’s 'milestones of a tradition'

What hap­pened last night in San Feliu is a bril­liant mo­ment in Guixols’s his­tory. When fu­ture gen­er­a­tions look back upon that night, they will see how on Au­gust 13, 1958, the city ex­pe­ri­enced a great event that, out of our love for it, we would like to be re­mem­bered as the mile­stone of a tra­di­tion.” This was writ­ten by a pas­sion­ate colum­nist in the Girona news­pa­per Los Sitios about the night of the first ever edi­tion of the Porta Fer­rada music fes­ti­val of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, which this year cel­e­brates its 62nd edi­tion.

Since that his­toric night, a great many more sum­mer fes­ti­vals have been born to be­come key el­e­ments of Cat­alo­nia’s cul­tural land­scape. It is not un­usual to hear talk of a fes­ti­val bub­ble, of an over­sup­ply of these events that are one step away from col­lapse. Yet the truth is that it is hard to imag­ine a Cata­lan sum­mer with­out fes­ti­vals, es­pe­cially mu­si­cal ones, which in the past few years have evolved to be­come gen­uine meet­ing points of so­cial cel­e­bra­tion.

For a cou­ple of months, from mid-June to mid-Au­gust, these cul­tural fes­ti­vals ex­tend to every cor­ner of the coun­try. It used to be the case that most of the sum­mer fes­ti­vals were con­cen­trated in places along the Mediter­ranean coast, but now there are many also to be found in­land and in Cat­alo­nia’s moun­tain re­gions.

And every year what is on offer ex­pands, con­tra­dict­ing the fore­casts of some that one im­pact of the pan­demic would be a de­cline in the num­ber of these events that at­tract large num­bers of peo­ple in a sin­gle venue. The va­ri­ety of per­for­mance and venue is also im­pres­sive, rang­ing from baroque music per­formed in small his­toric churches to the pulse of elec­tronic music pro­jected across wide open spaces crowded with spec­ta­tors. Al­most any style of music one can imag­ine is on offer some­where in Cat­alo­nia dur­ing the sum­mer, per­formed by the very best artists from home and abroad. And it all began with that sin­gle mile­stone over 60 years ago…

fea­ture Sum­mer fes­ti­vals