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Every September, Barcelona celebrates La Mercè.
For a few days, the city changes its rhythm. Squares become stages, streets become meeting places, balconies become viewpoints and thousands of people leave their homes to take possession of the city once again.
There are concerts, exhibitions, performances and events of every imaginable kind. Barcelona is a cosmopolitan city, home to people who have arrived from almost every corner of the world, and its Festa Major naturally reflects this diversity. And yet, year after year, some of the greatest crowds still gather around something much older.
A giant walking down a street. A human tower rising above a square. The sound of a gralla. The beating of drums. A dragon breathing fire into the darkness.
Perhaps Joan Amades would not have been surprised. The great Catalan ethnologist devoted much of his life to collecting the customs, celebrations, songs, beliefs and traditions of ordinary people. His monumental Costumari Català understood popular culture not as something preserved behind glass, but as something alive: a collective language transmitted from one generation to another. La Mercè speaks that language extraordinarily well.
One of its most symbolic moments is the Toc d'Inici. The Festa Major begins not merely with words but with music, movement and ritual. The city's festive figures enter the scene and Barcelona seems to summon its own imaginary world into existence.
Giants and giantesses, dwarfs, beasts and traditional dancers are no longer decorative figures. For a few hours, they become inhabitants of the city. Then come the cercaviles. The giants advance slowly through streets that normally belong to buses, bicycles, taxis and hurried pedestrians. Children look upwards. Adults do too. There is something wonderfully subversive about a giant walking through a modern city. For a moment, everyday Barcelona disappears and another Barcelona emerges from underneath it.
And then there are the castellers. Few images can explain Catalan popular culture so powerfully. A castell exists only because many people agree to build it together. At its base, the pinya becomes an extraordinary human architecture of arms, shoulders and trust. Above it, floor after floor rises until the smallest casteller reaches the top and raises a hand. For a few seconds, the whole square seems to breathe as one. Strength alone cannot build a castell. It requires balance, courage, technique and, above all, confidence in others. Perhaps this is why the Diada Castellera attracts such enormous crowds during La Mercè. People are not simply watching a spectacle. They are watching a community construct something impossible and then carefully dismantle it again.
But Barcelona has another face during its Festa Major. When darkness falls, fire arrives. The Correfoc transforms the streets into a territory of sparks, drums, devils and fantastic beasts. Dragons and other creatures spit fire while the diables dance beneath showers of sparks. People do not merely watch. They run with them. Fire has accompanied Mediterranean celebrations for centuries. In the Correfoc, something ancient survives inside the contemporary city: our fascination with darkness, noise, danger, light and collective excitement. For a while, Barcelona ceases to look like the carefully ordered city of maps and avenues. It becomes elemental. Fire, smoke, drums and people.
Perhaps this is the most fascinating thing about La Mercè. Barcelona changes constantly. Languages change. Neighbourhoods change. People arrive and people leave. Buildings disappear and new ones rise. The city absorbs influences from everywhere because it has always been a Mediterranean port open to the world.
But when the Festa Major arrives, thousands of people still crowd into the streets to watch traditions whose roots reach far beyond their own lives. They wait for the giants. They follow the gralles. They look upwards when the castell begins to rise. They run beneath the sparks of the Correfoc. Modernity has not made these traditions irrelevant. Perhaps it has made them even more necessary. Because popular culture gives a city something that cannot be built with concrete or designed by an urban planner: a shared memory. And memory does not mean remaining trapped in the past. It means knowing where we come from while continuing to change.
Barcelona has traditionally been called the Cap i Casal de Catalunya. The expression is difficult to translate perfectly. It means much more than capital. Cap is the head; casal evokes the house, the home, the place where a community recognises itself. During La Mercè, the expression acquires a particularly beautiful meaning.
Barcelona is cosmopolitan, Mediterranean, contradictory, noisy, changing and extraordinarily diverse. But it is also the capital of Catalunya. And when the giants dance, when the gralles sound, when the castellers raise their towers and when the dragons fill the streets with fire, the city remembers it.
Perhaps Joan Amades would have walked among those crowds with his notebook in his pocket, observing everything. Perhaps he would have recognised many of the gestures. And perhaps he would have understood something that La Mercè continues to demonstrate every September: tradition survives not because we preserve it, but because we practise it. A tradition nobody performs eventually becomes history. A tradition that still fills the streets belongs to the present. And every September, during La Mercè, Barcelona does something wonderfully simple.
Perhaps this is why Joan Amades still feels so extraordinarily present during La Mercè. His work was never merely a catalogue of curious things that people used to do. By collecting giants and dances, songs and sayings, legends, beasts, customs and celebrations, he helped preserve the collective memory of a country.
In 2009, when Barcelona dedicated part of La Mercè to Amades on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he was beautifully introduced almost as the character of a folk tale:
Once upon a time, there was a man who travelled throughout Catalonia asking people to tell him about their customs and traditions, so that he could write them down in a book and make sure that nobody would forget them.
And perhaps that is the best way to understand both Amades and La Mercè. Because traditions do not survive simply because somebody once wrote them down. They survive because somebody still carries the giant. Because somebody still plays the gralla. Because somebody still climbs onto another person's shoulders. Because somebody still dresses as a diable and lights the fire. And because thousands of people still come out into the streets to see them.
Barcelona changes. It has always changed. But beneath that constantly changing city there is another Barcelona made of gestures, sounds, memories and rituals passed from one generation to another.
Barcelona is the Cap i Casal. And every September, when the drums begin to beat, the giants start to dance and the first sparks illuminate the streets, that old Barcelona does not return from the past. It reminds us that it never left.
For during La Mercè, the enchanting magic of popular culture takes over the city, and each of us transforms for a day into whatever we wish to be -a devil, a casteller, a capgròs, or a queen -because this is Barcelona, the heart and soul of Catalunya.
The city recognises itself.
More information: Runner Bean Tours
