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Yesterday was a day of intense emotions. With hardly any time to rest, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma drove to Tarragona, where the greatest castells competition in history awaited them.
Congratulations to the champions, Castellers de Vilafranca, and to all the colles that put on a fascinating, thrilling, and unique spectacle.
The origins of the Catalan castells can be traced back to the ball de valencians, a traditional dance related to the Valencian muixerangues. These performances ended with the construction of small human towers.
When this tradition reached the Camp de Tarragona, something changed. The human constructions gradually became more important than the dance itself. Rivalry encouraged groups to build higher and more difficult towers, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century two rival groups were already documented in Valls.
Valls became the cradle of the castells, and its Plaça del Blat is still considered kilometre zero of the casteller world. From there, a tradition was born whose fundamental idea is astonishingly simple: people standing on other people in order to reach higher. But simplicity disappears very quickly when a castell begins to grow.
A castell is not simply a tower. It is a carefully calculated human structure. At its base is the pinya, the mass of people that supports the tower, stabilises it and protects the castellers if the structure collapses. In the most difficult constructions, additional supporting levels appear above it: the folre and, in some cases, the manilles. Then comes the tronc, the visible body of the castell. Above it is the pom de dalt, formed by the youngest castellers. Finally comes the enxaneta, the child who climbs to the summit and raises a hand -the aleta- to show that the castell has been carregat.
But reaching the top is only half the achievement. A castell must come down again. Only when every casteller has descended safely can it be said to have been descarregat. This is perhaps what makes castells so fascinating. They are architecture without stone, steel or concrete. Their materials breathe, tremble, become tired and feel fear.
A cathedral is designed not to move. A castell survives because hundreds of tiny movements constantly correct one another. It is an architecture of balance.
The traditional motto of the castellers is: Força, equilibri, valor i seny. Strength, balance, courage and common sense. Yet there is another element that is perhaps even more important: trust.
The enxaneta climbs because someone is underneath. That person stands because somebody else supports them. And beneath them there are dozens -sometimes hundreds- of people whose faces may never appear in the photograph of the completed castell.
There are no insignificant positions in a human tower. Perhaps that is why castells have become such a powerful symbol of Catalan popular culture. The individual achievement is impossible without collective effort. A castell does not ask who is the most important person. It asks where each person is needed.
This also explains the extraordinary capacity of the colles castelleres to integrate people. Age, origin, profession, social status or physical appearance matter much less than the contribution each person can make. There are positions for different bodies, different strengths and different abilities. And anyone can enter the pinya. You do not need to be born into the tradition to become part of it. You learn by standing beside others, rehearsing with them, trusting them and eventually becoming someone whom others can trust. Integration here is not theoretical. It is physical. You literally become part of something larger than yourself.
For most of their history, however, castells were overwhelmingly a male world. That began to change decisively during the final decades of the twentieth century. From the late 1970s and especially during the 1980s, women became increasingly present in the colles, not simply as spectators or supporters, but as castellers.
The change was social, but it was also technical. Different heights, weights and body types allowed the architecture of the tronc to evolve. Lighter structures could be built without sacrificing strength, helping the colles imagine constructions that previous generations could barely have contemplated. Women did not simply enter the world of castells. They helped transform what a castell could be. Their presence also reminds us that traditions survive not by remaining unchanged, but by being capable of changing without losing their identity.
On 16 November 2010, UNESCO inscribed the castells on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The recognition went far beyond the spectacular nature of human towers. UNESCO highlighted something deeper: the way castells transmit knowledge from generation to generation and create a sense of identity, continuity, social cohesion and solidarity. That distinction seems particularly appropriate. A castell is intangible heritage in the most literal sense. When the tower comes down, nothing physical remains. There is no monument. No building. No object. What remains is the knowledge of how to build it, the memory of having done it and the community capable of doing it again.
And then came Sunday, 4 October 2026. The XXX Concurs de Castells in Tarragona offered one of those days when the limits of a tradition suddenly seemed to move. The Castellers de Vilafranca completed the 3 de 10 amb folre i manilles. Then the 4 de 10 amb folre i manilles. And finally they achieved something that had never been completed before: the extraordinary 9 de 9 amb folre. Nine people on each level. Nine storeys. A human structure of almost unimaginable complexity.
The Colla Vella dels Xiquets de Valls also pushed the frontier, completing the formidable 4 de 9 sense folre and loading the 3 de 9 sense folre, another structure situated at the extreme limits of what the human body and casteller technique can achieve.
Watching the Concurs, an inevitable question emerged. Where is the ceiling?
Every generation of castellers has probably believed that certain constructions marked the natural limit of human towers. And then another generation arrived. Techniques improved. Rehearsals became more sophisticated. More people joined the colles. Women transformed their structures. Medical and biomechanical knowledge increased. Castellers learned how to distribute weight more efficiently and control movements with extraordinary precision.
The impossible became possible. Then the possible became normal. And a new impossible appeared. But human beings have limits. Gravity has not changed. Bodies have not stopped being fragile.
There must be a point at which adding another level, removing another support or creating an even more complex structure becomes physically impossible. Perhaps some of the castells we are seeing today are already approaching that frontier. Perhaps the ceiling is close. Or perhaps, somewhere in a local d'assaig, somebody is already imagining a way of moving it again. That uncertainty is part of the beauty of the castells. Because their greatest achievement may not be reaching ten storeys, completing a castell sense folre or inventing another construction.
Their greatest achievement is demonstrating what human beings can do when nobody climbs alone. A castell rises because hundreds of people agree, for a few extraordinary minutes, to trust one another completely. And perhaps that is why, when the enxaneta raises a hand above the square, we all look upwards. Not because one person has reached the top. Because everyone has.
More information: Coordinadora de les Colles Castelleres de Catalunya
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