Steve’s Pictures of the Castellers

Nichole has uploaded her pictures, now it’s my turn.

Here they are, I’m going to try and explain them so they are hopefully more than just pictures.

These two are just showing the people climbing up, and how they get settled, also in the second photo, you can see the enxaneta (the little girl in the helmet on the left side) starting her way up to the top. The last photo is the completed tower, 7 “floors.”

This photo has been cropped to show that the first floor that we see in all these floors in most of the photos is either the second floor, or even the third. Looks comfy, huh?

Here are more photos of another tower. The enxaneta has to raise her hand at the top and start to climb to the other side for the tower to be considered a success. Illustrated below:

This next set shows how they build the base. This is the tower that took the fall, as shown in the video. In the second photo, you see the second and third floors being built. Keep in mind, all those people are already standing on other people that are the ground floor! The third photo is showing the 4th floor. The 4th photo shows the anxaneta climbing up to the top, to make it a total of 9 floors. Then a photo of the completed tower, considered a success because she did start to climb down, and then the last photo shows the ‘post fall tower.’

Amazing stuff…Here’s a shot of part of the crowd that turned out for this event:

And last but not least, I have uploaded a full sized photo of a completed tower. Again, it’s full sized but it shows the details of the enxaneta (the top) and the aixecador (eye-sheck-a-door) (under the enxaneta) forming the top two floors, and eveyone else. You can see as you go up in height, the people get smaller and younger.

I am really glad to got to witness this tradition. We almost didn’t, but I asked Dani at dinner one night, and it turns out they were performing the next day! This goes on for hours. We stayed for a little while and saw the single column walking towers, a few successful towers and the one fall. There was also a tower they decided not to complete. At any time, anyone of the team members can call it off, ultimately the enxaneta has the final say. We decided to leave after a while, and we watched a few on TV once we got home with a new apperication for what we were seeing. This was definitely one of the many highlights of our trip. Much much more to come!

- steve