Castells, Torres, y Pilares

(Castles, Towers, and Pillars)

Mid-September in Barcelona sees the Festiu de la Mercè, Festival of Saint Mary of Mercy, Catalonia's "national day" - like Independence Day, except Catalonia isn't independent. So we have a four-day weekend from school. I decided to go to Tarragona, which is a short train ride south of Barcelona. It's a Roman city, with relatively intact ruins and beautiful, less crowded beaches. I spent most of the day checking out the ruins and swimming. The ruins were nice, but not much once you've seen the Pont du Gard and Le Temple de Diane and the arena (and so on...) in Nimes, France. The beach was indeed lovely, i hiked out to a sparsely populated small beach hidden between two cliffs. I swam for probably three hours, enjoying the bigger waves, the scenery, and losing an earring. A handmade garnet piece i got on the Charles Bridge in Prague, i'm quite sad about it, actually.

After a very late lunch and some sketching, i got to see the "human castles." It's some kind of tradition of building very high towers out of people. It's a little hard to explain, so i took a bunch of pictures!

There are different teams that participate, though it's not a competition and they all seem to help each other. Each one has their own little outfit. The first thing they do is wrap their lower backs with stretchy black cloth. They wrap it very tightly. This has a two-fold purpose - the first is to protect the back, and the second... well, you'll see shortly.



This guy used a neck brace as well:



Then they made a big mass of people. I'm sure there was a very deliberate structure to it, but it wasn't clear to the untrained eye:



It was obvious that they were making kind of a human flying buttress.



Then they started building...









Structural integrity requires a special kind of intimacy in this situation:



Now, even i, with my unpracticed human-tower building skills, could figure out that the bigger, heavier people went on the bottom, and the smaller, lighter ones went on top. What i didn't expect was out little and light the ones on the very top would be:



That little girl is not older than 6!

Here's the second one being built. If you look closely, you can see the second reason for the black bands - footholds!





A third one, with little teeny girls ready to scale to the top:



My favorite part was the beginning of the end. The little ones would climb to the top for just a split second, wave, and then they would shimmy down all the way to the bottom, like they were sliding down a coconut tree. I thought it was incredibly cute, but i can't imagine ever letting my own child do something like that. They must have been up three stories. And one of the towers got quite wobbly at one point!




Today i went to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibit, which i'll write about in my next entry. Tomorrow, the flea market! And possibly La Sagrada Familia, a massive landmark i have yet to see.