Now that the power situation seems to be under control and we have some time to just sit down and relax, I can finally post a long entry with some of the details about the festival / this weekend.
As of last night, La Mercè has ended for this year. Dani was so happy that we chose this time of year to visit. This is apparently the best time to visit Barcelona because this is the largest festival. You should have seen the number of people that have been crowding the city – photos didn’t seem to do it justice, so I took little videos to help. It’s just amazing.
I think I’ll use this entry to post the details, and then another post with just the photos.
As mentioned previously, La Mercè is the city’s patron saint, so they go all-out in their celebration of her each year with lots of dancing, fire, fireworks, drums, etc. They start a parade of dragons that are old, some “new” by their standards – but older than most buildings in the U.S. We saw the oldest of them all this year – Dani likes to call it a chicken, because it’s a bird of some sort (perhaps supposed to be a griffon?). I believe that one is from the 14th century?
So they take these “dragons” and parade them through the city. They have various musicians (mostly drummers) trail behind them. Meanwhile, they start to light them on fire. Well, not the dragons themselves. They have things that kind of look like flares that they attach to them and light them. Lighting more as they progress through the city. When they reach the end of their parade, they’re completely lit up!
After the dragon parade they have what’s called the “correfocs” (fire runners). The correfocs only go a few blocks through the city – but it takes them a very long time. They have poles that they attach fireworks to and they hold them up and dance around with them. The fireworks spin around.
They also have special people who’s poles don’t spin. They only have one bit of fireworks attached that points in one direction. Those are the ones you have to watch out for because they chase you around. If you’re close to the edge of the crowd, they assume that you want to be chased.
It’s funny seeing people getting ready for that. You can tell who plans on getting really close, vs. the tourists and those who plan on staying back. It’s recommended that you wear long sleeve shirts that you don’t care if they get a little burned, and an old hat to protect your hair. It’s not really dangerous, but precautions just in case. If you plan on getting close, you should wear a bandanna over your mouth and nose for the smoke, etc. I also saw a couple of people with big safety goggles on. hahaha
Following each group of correfocs are drummers and several people carrying the spare fireworks. There are also “diables” (devils) following closely and dancing around. These are the people who also danced around with dragons. Several of the dragons also appear scattered throughout the fire runners. It appears to be a bit of a tradition to hop in underneath the correfocs near the drummers (it’s safer there because they don’t want to light their drums on fire) and dance around. We… kind of did that – for a couple of seconds. Then realizing what it was that we were doing, we quickly ran back to the crowd. hahahaha
Meanwhile, sometime after the dragon parade and the correfocs the fireworks begin over the beach. The weather for this weekend wasn’t the best. It was very humid and overcast and threatening to rain – but only sprinkled every now and again. Until we went to see the fireworks from the beach, that is. The weather for that was miserable, but didn’t interfere with the fireworks. The wind was blowing out to the Mediterranean so we still had a great view. We were just very wet while watching the show. Thankfully, this is Spain, so it was still around 70 degrees out.
It was a standard fireworks show with a few new fireworks that we hadn’t seen before. It was nice. We both love fireworks, so we thought it was beautiful as always.
Moving on, we had the castellers (cast-EE-yas – castle builders – only found in Catalonia) on Sunday afternoon. Wow. That was just amazing. Steve and I are still having some problems waking up at a decent hour (~2pm Spain time / 9am EST) because we’ve been getting to bed late. We almost decided to not bother to check this out, but we’re SO glad that we went.
They hold this in a large intersection where the city hall and the Catalonia government building are. They have these “giants” made of wood and paper mache and cloth, etc. that they dance around in the crowd of people. We think they’re telling a story with them. Apparently each town or neighborhood has these giants that they “take for walks” during celebrations. Since this is such a large celebration, several surrounding towns bring theirs and they start dancing them around – which is no easy feat. They weigh about 2-300lbs!
After that, the castle builders start. Each colored uniform is for a different town/city. The red/pink is Barcelona. They start off making 1 person wide x 3 or 4 people tall “castles” with a small child at the top called the enxaneta (an-shah-NET-a). The amazing thing is that they’re able to stack up that high AND walk around like that. Then each group goes back and forth trying to do better than the last. 4 people around by 7 or 8 (or more) high – note that they only walk with the single column of people, not the wider / bigger ones. A castle is successful once the enxaneta reaches the top and puts his or her arm in the air, then starts to climb back down the other side.
Amazing.
Watching it on tv or seeing the photos don’t do it justice. We have photos and videos. Apparently this goes on for hours. We watched it for about an hour, then went back to Dani’s place and watched it for a short time on tv (so we could have a better view). There were several successful castles while we were there, and a couple of not-as-successful. One was technically successful, but then it fell. Because this does happen, the enxaneta is now required to wear a helmet. Another one that we saw, they decided at very nearly the last minute to back-out.
So this leads us to last night. We took it a little easy for the first part of the day, then went to Dani’s friends’ flat to watch a movie – ended up watching an episode of the Young Ones (not Steve’s cup-of-tea, and not so much mine anymore either). Then headed out for the official ending of La Mercè – the pyromusical (?). It’s a large water and light show. Each year it has a music theme, but you don’t know the details of what they’re going to do otherwise until you show up for it. This year’s theme was jazz over the years.
The water show (to classical music) was abolsultely beautiful. I think I got a few photos and video clips of that.
The actual pyromusical – AMAZING. Initially I had no idea what we were in for and wasn’t even sure that I was interested in this “pyromusical” thing that Dani spoke of. But he’s been a great tourguide so far… so I figured it was worth checking out.
Apparently sometimes they use lazors and spotlights, etc., and sometimes fireworks. This year – fireworks.
40 minutes of fireworks. FORTY! 40 minutes of incredibly coreographed fireworks to jazz. Talk about the best fireworks show we’ve ever seen. We have no idea how they were able to do something like that. It was incredibly low in the sky. The water fountain also coreographed with colors, etc. as well. The lights and colors reflecting in the buildings along the side of the fountain.
A-MA-ZING.
Steve said that if he had the money, he would fly out here every year – just for that. He said that that show alone made this trip worth it.
Leaving the pyromusical wasn’t all that easy. There was a good 100,000 people there – easy. Steve swears it was closer to 2mil. He started counting while I tried to take some photos and a video, when we ran into someone from Calgary, Canada and chatted for a minute about how crazy the number of people there were.
Today has been our “day off”. We got to bed sometime around 4am – typical. Woke up around 1pm. Ran out to the local grocery store before it closed for it’s 2 hr lunch siesta (I wish we had those in the States), came back, made toast (see ealier post) and did some laundry.
I think we’re going to head out for lunch. Hopefully when we come back we’ll have time to resize and upload the photos & videos.
-nichole
