Holy Guacamole! Our neighborhood, Barrio Graçia, is in the midst of it’s annual festival right now. This is the Festa Major. Every barrio in Barcelona has one of these once a year, but Graçia is where all of the cool kids hang out, so ours is the best, of course.

And holy shit, is it ever! The long-term residents of the city spend the entire year planning what their street is going to do for the festival that year. About two weeks ago, large power cables began appearing all over the neighborhood, then wires began being strung across the roads, about one story high, for canopies to be built from.

Tuesday was magical - Graçia’s narrow, tranquil streets suddenly became fairlylands, as giant forests appeared on one street, another became the inside of an underground mineshaft, another got a new roof of beautiful fluffy clouds, another became the inside of a bright pink feather boa, another became an ode to Barcelona’s public art, another became a giant papier-mâchét fish market, and another became Route 66, complete with giant motorcyles and mannequin bike scum. Everything is made from recycled materials, too, which is a nice bonus.

But the decorations are just the start. There’s a bandstand on every corner, and where there isn’t a bandstand, local bands just set up on the street and rock out. About 100,000 people come into Graçia each day that the festa is going, so getting around can be seriously challenging - when the music is good, people are packed tight, dancing and drinking cañas, claras, mojitos and caipirinias. Getting through them can be tough, it’s better to just surrender and join the dancing.

But of course, it’s not all stationary entertainment. There are also parades of castellers (human towers), dancers, bands, capgrossos (animated mannequins taller than two people), drum cores, assholes firing muskets and canons that are painfully loud, and of course, Diablos.

The Diablos are interesting - they’re kids dressed as devils, complete with lots of pyrotechnics. They each have a long stick, and at the end of the stick, they fix spinning mega-sparklers, which go BOOM when the sparks are done. The sparks fly about 15 feet, and the kids use them aggressively, pointing them into the crowd or at people’s feet to make them dance. You can expect to get lots of low-grade burns if you want a close up view of the Diablos, my scalp has quite a few of them now, and bits of my hair are probably a bit shorter than they used to be. In the midst of the diablos is a giant mascot, usually a dragon or a lizard, but at least one of them was a giant devilish Jabugo pig. And, of course, the mascots are loaded with pyrotechnics too!

This stuff is fascinating to me because in the USA, holy fuck would it not fly… The kids carrying these things range from eight years old to twenty. In the USA, they’d have to wear complete flame retardant suits and helmets, but here, they’re just wearing heavy burlap costumes and shades. And that whole “audience” thing, no way in the USA. The audience would be 200 meters away, behind plexiglass. Here, I have photos taken from less than two feet away, underneath the rain of sparks. I got pretty well sizzled.

And the same with the castellers. These are towers of people where a big guy gets on another big guy’s shoulders, a smaller guy gets on his shoulders, and so on, down to a five year old child, maybe three stories tall. They only do it when ambulances are present, but still, wow! Hope that the guy on the bottom doesn’t sneeze.

There’s a darker side to all of this, of course, but even the darker side is more comical than, well, dark. On Friday, we had a drum core and 500 people below our window until 4:30am. With the narrow streets and stone buildings, we may as well have had a drum core and 500 people IN our apartment until 4:30am. But it was cool to watch, so what the hey? Watching 13 guys simultaneously peeing on our building was also interesting to watch. The drum core eventually moved on to Plaça del Sol, and rocked it until about 6:30. I vaguely recall that thing called “sleep”…

Last night was also interesting. At about 5:30 in the morning, we had a proto-riot around the corner. I say “proto-riot” because nothing violent happened and everybody was happy, but it could have become violent easily if the right stimuli had been applied. There was a group of about a thousand people, drumming hard on trash dumpsters and dancing harder on top of the recycle bins. A young woman drove up in a panel truck, smiling hugely, and drove right through the crowd, getting her van rocked hard and drummed on harder.

Then the Guardia Urbana showed up, with people flowing away from them like a liquid. These guys are bad-ass looking, if for no other reason than that they have really stylie uniforms and only seem to hire people who are over six feet tall. And they wear berets. They got booed a bit, and pelted a lot with full beer cans, but they didn’t really do anything except look imposing and replace the dumpster to its normal spot. Eventually, I got bored and wandered away. I think the Spaniards are too interested in partying to riot.

Oh, and I dropped the trash I’d gone outside to dump someplace else.

So all in all, the Festa is really cool and even more interesting. And, oh my god, the Spaniards can party. But even more importantly, they don’t just party - they party with class and with a lot of beauty and creativity. I’m very very glad that we live in Graçia! And, go check out some more of our pictures!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 3:50 am by Jason and is filed under Spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.