Oh Happy Day

Today was a very good day for two reasons.  The first was that last night the Futbol Club Barcelona played a match against their arch rival Real Madrid in what is called here a “classic” – the confrontation in the Spanish league between Spain’s two most important teams.  I don’t subscribe to the pay channel where you could watch the game and I was not disposed to go out at night, alone, to watch it in a bar, so it wasn’t until late this morning that I found out that Barça had won 5-0.  That is a thrilling result for any Barça fan, but even more so this year after some impolite bragging and put-downs on the part of Real Madrid’s trainer and their star player (who isn’t nearly as cute as they say.  Has anyone ever looked at Xavi Alonso?  Now there is cute) just before the game.  Every now and then justice prevails.

The second and more important reason for this being a good day for me personally is that I finally, after much money, effort, and disappointment, passed the exam for my Spanish driver’s license.  In fact, I learned about the result of last night’s Barça game from the examiner while I was driving around the streets of Tortosa, trying not to run anyone over.  Getting a license here is nothing at all like getting one in California, and in a subsequent post I will describe the process.  Suffice it to say that I consider it a big accomplishment and I am thus very relieved, a little bit proud, and very, very happy.

Catalan Independence

A few days ago, my stepson Manuel Serge sent me this letter, assuming I had already seen it, but thinking I would want to read it if I had not.  I had not.  And I was very happy that he sent it because it expressed my own sentiments but did it much more knowledgeably and eloquently than I ever could.  Susan DiGiacomo is an American who has lived in Catalunya for many years.  An anthropologist, she teaches at the University Rovira i Virgili, which is walking distance from where I used to live in Tarragona.  Too bad we never met!  I wrote to ask her if she would agree to my posting her letter on my blog and she graciously said yes, so with no further ado, here it is.  If you had any doubts about the wisdom or necessity of Catalan independence from Spain, perhaps this letter will reassure you.  If you didn’t know it was even an issue, read and find out why it is.

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest
Washington, DC 20500-0004
United States of America

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Dear President Obama:

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I write to you not only in your capacity as president of the United States, but also in your capacity as a former professor of constitutional law. In The Audacity of Hope, you propose shifting the metaphor through which we understand democracy in order to see it “not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had.” What the American constitution does, therefore, is to “organize the way by which we argue about our future.” Importantly, “Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course…”.

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I write to you, then, because in the country in which I live and work, what is happening is precisely this sort of attempt to end conversation by arguing that the house is already built, constitutionally, and that no further debate is even legitimate. In a formally democratic European state, a completely politicized constitutional court, four members of which – including the chief justice – have served for years on expired terms of office, has taken four years to produce a decision using the constitution as a weapon to crush the legitimate national aspirations of a people and to set absolute limits, once and for all, on the powers of home rule defined in that people’s statute of autonomy. The European state in question is Spain. The country in which I live and work is Catalonia. Its statute of autonomy was approved no fewer than three times: by the Catalan parliament, by the Spanish parliament, and by the Catalan people in a referendum. What is happening here, then, is an assault on democracy. In the United States, when the will of the people is not reflected in the constitution, the constitution has been amended, a total of 27 times since the year 1791. What the Spanish constitutional court has done is to consider the Spanish constitution of 1980 untouchable, engraved in stone, and their reading of it is so restrictive that the democratically expressed will of the Catalan people has no place in it.

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What is Catalonia? You will remember something about it from your visit to Barcelona many years ago. Catalonia is an ancient European nation with an equally ancient tradition of representative government. The document on which this form of government is based predates the English Magna Carta, and only Iceland has an older parliament. In the Middle Ages Catalonia was an independent polity, and later the Catalan-Aragonese Confederation ruled a Mediterranean empire that extended as far as Greece. During the 15th century, the dynastic marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile integrated Catalonia into “the Spains”, as the composite kingdom was known. But Catalonia did not lose its institutions of self-government until 1714, by force of arms, at the end of the Spanish War of Succession, when an absolutist monarchy came to power. It did not get them back for another 200 years, with the arrival of the Second Spanish Republic, but lost them again at the end of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Despite this history, Catalonia continued to remain linguistically, culturally, socially and economically distinct from the rest of the Spanish state. With the death of General Franco and his dictatorial regime in 1975, Catalonia began to recover once more its political institutions and the powers of home rule home abrogated by the victorious fascists, to reconstruct its national story in its own voice.

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How and why does the decision of Spain’s constitutional court affect me, since I retain my American passport although I am a permanent resident who lives and works here? It affects me because I have known Catalonia for three decades, since I came here to do anthropological research at the end of the Franco dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy, when it became apparent that the transition would have no legitimacy at all unless the political autonomy Catalonia enjoyed under the Second Republic were restored. Because I experienced, as an anthropologist, the cultural and political resistance to the Franco regime and the beginning of the process of national reconstruction in Catalonia during the transition to democracy. Because with the passage of time I have become a professor in a Catalan university, where I teach my classes in Catalan. I have, then, things at stake in Catalonia’s future. Many things, starting with the language in which I teach and write, which is recognized in the Catalan statute of autonomy as having preferential status in Catalan public institutions including schools and universities. This language, my second first language, is now threatened by the decision of the Spanish constitutional court.

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On Saturday, July 10, 2010 more than a million Catalans (according to the Barcelona city police, 1,100,000; according to the organizers of the demonstration, a million and a half; the total population of Catalonia now stands at just over 7 million) filled the streets in the heart of Barcelona, the Catalan capital, to reject the court’s decision to eviscerate the Catalan statute of autonomy and make our voices heard: “We are a nation. We decide.” After years of indignities, the court’s decision was the last straw and increasing numbers of Catalans see no other path to national survival except through full sovereignty, a peaceful and negotiated separation from the Spanish state and the establishment of a new Catalan state within the framework of the European Union. Kosovo’s history is different from Catalonia’s, but there is nothing in international law that prevents the democratically elected representatives of a people from unilaterally declaring independence.

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This past summer former president Jimmy Carter came to Barcelona to accept from the president of the Generalitat (the Catalan government) the Premi Internacional Catalunya, an international award in recognition of his work on behalf of human rights, democracy, and peace. His visit coincided closely with the announcement of the decision of the constitutional court. President Carter described this decision as an “error,” and offered to send international observers in the event of a referendum on Catalan independence. You should know that to date well over half a million Catalans have already voted for independence in nonbinding municipal referenda all over Catalonia. More such referenda are planned.

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I am not asking you to intervene in this process. I ask only that you interest yourself in what is happening here, that you discuss it with your advisers, that you seek information, and that you begin to establish contacts with the Catalan government that will emerge from this fall’s election. If I can help you to do this, you need only ask. Catalonia badly needs international interlocutors and international visibility.

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Respectfully yours,

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Susan M. DiGiacomo, Ph.D.
Professor
Departament d’Antropologia, Filosofia i Treball Social
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Tarragona
Catalunya 

Catalan Elections

Yesterday was the first day of campaigning for the Catalan parliamentary elections that will take place on 28 November.  This schedule allows 15 days of active campaigning; the 16^th day is considered a day of contemplation and no political activities are allowed.  The next day (always a Sunday) the election is held.

This is how elections are handled in Spain, whether they are local, regional, or national.  Other countries may do the same, I don’t know.  Here, two weeks before an election, posters go up, visits are made, and speeches are given; each party gets some free air time during the two weeks; the last day no campaigning is allowed -- it is reserved for thinking it over, and then, finally, off to the polls.  How much money do you think the Spanish spend on their elections compared to Americans?

In order to facilitate the public getting to the polls and then watching the returns on TV, the big Barcelona-Madrid football (soccer) match, originally scheduled for what turned out to be election Sunday, has been rescheduled for the following Monday.  Not the most convenient day of the week for football but hey, elections are important.  Then again, football is important.  Were they were afraid of low public viewing of the game or low public viewing of the election returns?

The Pope's Visit

Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did find Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Barcelona very moving.  After all, I’m not Catholic, not even Christian.  I’m Jewish but not religious.  I’m socially liberal, I believe gays should have all the same rights as anyone else, I do not think people should dictate to women whether or not they should (or can) have an abortion, I think we should all have the right to die when we feel the time has come, and I don’t like church being mixed with state affairs.

All of this makes me an unlikely person to be impressed or even interested in the Pope’s visit today.  But I was.  I was very interested and very moved.  Why?  Well, because I live in Spain where only 14.4% of Spaniards attend Mass regularly, but 73% of them define themselves as Catholic and to them the Pope is a very important person.  Also, I’ve been informed about the details of his visit all week when each day another street would be closed off, chairs set up in perfect rows by scores of volunteers, and this would be part of the day’s news.  Then there is the fact that his visit is important to Catalunya.  Today’s ceremony took place before a congregation of 6500 people including King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia of Spain.  Another 50,000 people followed the Mass outside with more than 300 priests there to offer Holy Communion.  His homily condemning gay marriage and the trend for society, this society, to become less religious was unfortunate although not unexpected.  Spain’s socialist government has enabled gay marriage, faster divorce, and easier access to abortion.  But that was not the main reason for his visit.  He came to consecrate Antoni Gaudi’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia.  Begun in 1882 and not expected to be finished for another fifteen years, the Sagrada Familia is already an UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Today’s consecration by the Pope lifted it from the status of a church to that of a basilica and, in my opinion, this is a good thing.

The Pope delivered part of his homily in Catalan, an important signal to the world that the Catalan language has merit and is important.  His visit provided the means by which people all over the world could see the interior of the church for the first time.  Antoni Gaudi was a very devout Catholic and spent the last fifteen years of his life devoted only to the building of this huge and unique church, living like a monk on the grounds.  He is buried in the crypt.  He is now going through the process (whether he knows it or not) of becoming a saint of the Catholic Church.  He, I have no doubt, would have been very pleased and honored by today’s visit.  

To be, or not to be

It can get boring living out here beyond the pale; there are no concerts, lectures, or art museums nearby.  But government bureaucracies transcend geographical limitations so even out here I can and do find legal hassles.

Soon after I came to Spain I decided that when I was eligible, I would become a Spanish citizen.  Having no intention of going back to the U.S., it would give me the right to vote here (where I follow the issues), and it would make me more a part of the society where I live.  Spain makes you renounce any other citizenship and turn in your former passport, but America does not have that restriction so you only have to apply for a duplicate to have your American passport back.

About a year ago the time had come.  Among other things that were required was that pesky criminal record that I wrote about last April.  Once I had those fingerprints correctly done by the Catalan police, it took another few weeks to actually get the official statement from California.  In fact there was some irregularity to what I had sent, but the sheriff was kind enough to let it go through.  He is a very nice and helpful sheriff and has a standing invitation to come and visit.  I had the statement officially translated into Spanish in Tarragona and added it to the growing mountain of papers.

In the middle of collecting endless documents for my citizenship application, I was also immersed in trying to get myself inscribed as Manuel’s wife in Panama, the country from which he gets his largest retirement pension.  They won’t pay out any extra for me, but getting listed as his wife will give me widow benefits if he dies before I do.

We’ve sent numerous documents to Panama over several years and made many follow-up attempts by letter and phone.  Manuel even went into the Social Security office in Panama City in person last year.  They wanted this, then they wanted that, then they said that something we sent (at considerable trouble and expense) never arrived, even though we had sent it registered mail.  That was my birth certificate.  About three years ago we went to the Dominican Consulate in Barcelona to request a copy of my birth certificate.  They told us that you can only do it in person in the Dominican Republic.  If you can’t go, you can ask a friend or family member to go in for you.  Of course I don’t know a soul in the Dominican Republic.  In hindsight I see the trick they were playing on me, but at the time we were desperate, so we were grateful when the functionary said he would find an attorney who would take care of it for us.  That only cost us about 300 euros.  Now I needed yet another birth certificate for my citizenship application, so I decided to try a different route and requested it online through the Dominican Embassy in Washington.  It cost me $10 plus postage (actually my stepson Manuel graciously wrote the check for me).  No one got rich off of that certificate.

Unfortunately, the social security office in Panama later informed us that I would have to provide a court statement certifying that my name was legally changed from the one on my birth certificate to the one I currently use, the same one that is on my American passport, our marriage certificate, all my Spanish documents, everything that is current.  Not only that, but I have a Spanish court issued statement certifying that I am alive.  If I have documents to prove that I am married to Manuel and up-to-date identity papers that certify that I exist and am currently alive, a citizen of the U.S., and a resident of Spain, why do I even need a birth certificate?  What difference could where or when I was born possibly make in this matter?

Changing my name has been a kind of hobby of mine.  Possibly it has to do with an identity problem – something I’ve evidently been plagued with over the years.  I’ve changed my first name, my middle name, and my family name, and the latter I’ve changed more than once.    But some years ago I settled on what I use now, having my father’s original last name as my middle name and my first married name as my family name.  In fact, I’ve used this family name twice as long as I did my maiden name (and my maiden name was not our original family name because my parents had changed it when we immigrated to the U.S.). 

So I sent Panama an affidavit stamped and sealed by the American Consul in Barcelona explaining and testifying to the name change.  But it wouldn’t do.  Nothing short of a legal statement from an American court would do.  I thought of applying for the court order myself using a Nolo Press do-it-yourself book, but part of the procedure is a personal appearance in court and besides you are supposed to be residing in the court district.  Since it wasn’t straightforward, I asked Howard, an old friend of mine from Los Angeles who practices law in the Bay Area to help me.  So I am now in the middle of trying to obtain a court order certifying the legal change of my birth name to my present name.  It has cost me a lot of time and may end up also costing several hundred dollars.  But after I obtain the court order, I’ve promised myself never to change my name again.

Back to my Spanish citizenship.  In August, when I thought I had all the required documents, I went in to the government office in Tortosa.  But of course I didn’t have everything after all.  So I went away and worked on assembling the rest.  And finally, last week I went in with the full complement of papers.  They went through it all and could find nothing missing except the marriage certificate issued here in Spain, certifying our American marriage.  But I had the official signed and stamped receipt for having filed the request for it, and that would suffice until the real document is produced.  It seemed that everything was, after all, in order.

I thought we were finished, but they still had one small surprise in store for me.  Just as I was getting ready to leave, the clerk mentioned that once my citizenship was approved, my name would be changed.  What?  I don’t want to change my name.  Yes, my name would be changed to the Spanish way of doing last names.  After all, at that point I would be Spanish, and Spanish family names are in two parts: first the father’s family name, and then the mother’s.  What a nightmare!  I didn’t grow up with my father’s real last name; he had changed it when I was two.  Some years ago I adopted my father’s real family name as my middle name, and it now appears on all my official papers, but I’ve never used it as my last name.  I can’t even pronounce my mother’s maiden name properly.  Besides, the one she put on my birth certificate was not her real maiden name.  She had been using this one during the War as a kind of protection because her own was so obviously more Jewish.  I guess changing names is an inherited family trait.

Now this new development presented some serious problems for me.  First of all I am in the middle of a long distance legal process to get the name I use officially certified, court-ordered, and recorded.  Then the next thing I do is go change it to something else again!  Apart from the fact that I don’t like being dictated to, changing my name again seems to me to be asking for a lot more trouble down the road.  And besides, my name is part of my identity.  I like my name.  I chose my name.  It’s been mine for forty years.  It’s who I am.  Who are these people to say I must change it?

I left the Civil Register office with all my documents in hand, telling the clerk that I would have to think about it.

La Sardana

When I moved to Barcelona I learned to dance the sardana, the Catalan national dance. I found a place that holds a dance every Friday evening, with lessons for those who want them. Manuel didn’t want to go, so I started going alone and after a while I got to where I could do the sardana passably, at least to where I was usually headed in the right direction on the appropriate foot at the right time. It eventually turned out that learning the sardana became much more than just learning the steps of a dance, but more about that another day.


The sardana is danced in a circle and entering a circle has its protocols. The man to the left of a woman is assumed to be her partner (although partners are not required), so one never enters between the pair. You also don’t enter between a man and the woman on his left (I don’t know why) unless you are a couple or you have no other option. It is always OK to enter between two women. The unlimited number of women in a circle allows any woman to dance whether or not she has a partner. So, once I learned how, if I wanted to dance, I just went to a place where they were having sardanes and joined in a circle.

Next, the common etiquette is to join into a circle of people who dance at the same level of knowledge and physical ability as you. That makes it difficult for the complete beginner who doesn’t know beans about how to do the dance. But there are those kind souls who will take a newcomer aside and show them the steps, although it takes more than a few minutes to really learn the dance (simple as it may look) and if you dance badly, you spoil it for the rest of the dancers in your circle.

At first I had tried to pick up the steps by following behind someone in a circle or joining into a group of gent gran (elderly!). But even with the gent gran I was a little bit lost. For one thing, inexplicably, they would all suddenly stop the step they were doing and then start in again either with the same step or with a different one, sometimes on the left foot, and other times on the right. Figuring it out seemed like a great puzzle to which I didn’t have a clue, except that the stops coincided with stops, or breaks, in the music. But every time I went, I heard different melodies. Clearly everyone knew when to stop, when to change steps, which foot to start out on again and exactly when to finish. Had all the hundreds of dancers committed every piece of music to memory?

On the other hand, dancing with the gent gran could get a little boring.  Quite frankly, some of them schlepped. Those groups of younger people who danced better seemed a lot more interesting -- instead of shuffling they bounced, sometimes they jumped, their foot movements were more precise and pretty to look at, and even though it was the same dance, there seemed to be more variety to what they did, certainly more elegance. It was clear that I wasn’t even close to their level of dancing, but I had my aspirations, so I decided I would take lessons which eventually led me to the Friday evening dances.

There are only two basic steps to the sardana: els curts (the shorts) and els llargs (the longs). You join them together with a combination of two- three- or four-step cambis (changes). The dance goes like this. On the numbered count you lift your knee and point your toes down and then tap the ground with the tip of your shoe. The following step will be with the same foot. Say you’re starting with your left foot, which is how the dance always begins, the curts go ONE, step, step, step, TWO, step, step, step, and you’ve moved a little to the right, then you’ve moved back a little to the left. Danced well, you have placed your feet very close together and on the third step you cross one foot in front of the other. After more than three months of practice, I was still tripping over myself every now and then if I didn’t concentrate on what I’m doing. Were my feet too big? The Catalans never trip.

Llargs go ONE, step, TWO, step, THREE, step, step, step, also going back and forth and ending up pretty much where you started. If, in addition, you also bounce once on your planted foot, keeping time to the rhythm, every time you point or step, then you are dancing rather well. If you dance entirely on the balls of your feet, bouncing but never touching your heels to the ground, then you’re a good dancer.

Every circle has a leader who calls out the cambis. That person is counting every beat of the music. The person who counts only has to know in advance how many tirades (sets or layers) the sardana has. Unless otherwise announced, the cobles always play sardanes of ten tirades. The leader counts the first set of curts, and later the first set of llargs. They can tell the end of a set because of a break in the music. After that, the leader keeps right on counting because all tirades of curts will have the same number the first set had, and all the llargs will have the same as the first set of llargs, and the leader has to keep counting to know when to call out the changes and the stops. The count for a set of llargs can number up into the eighties. That’s a lot of counting.

I have attended a couple of sardana events where there was no one in the circle who could count. You can’t dance properly if no one can count -- part of the joy of the dance is ending up exactly with the music.

Sometimes a circle will also have a second leader. This is the stylist. The stylist calls out when to bounce, to bounce more, to jump, to jump higher, to stop the jump or the bounce, and so forth. Because a well-danced circle constantly bobs up and down at different levels of intensity that complement the music, and everyone who dances knows when to start, when to bounce, when to jump, and when to stop, each circle looks like a living organism.

There is a sameness about sardanes that would boggle the mind of many. People who need constant stimulation of new and fast-moving things would probably not like the dance. If you are the type of person who needs to go to a new restaurant every weekend, the sardana might not be the dance for you. There is only one set formula for the dance, no opportunity for improvisation to speak of, and even though each song is different, many of them have melody fragments so similar that if you know the repertory, you still might initially confuse one for another. They all have the same structure, and your feet always do the same two steps.

So why do Catalans love the dance so much? Well for one thing, it has a subtle beauty when done well and the whole circle moves like one unit. Also, when you look across a plaça where many circles are dancing, it looks like some sort of musical mass movement and all the people know that they are participating in something intrinsic to their culture. The music too, once you get used to the slightly whiny sound of the gralles (a unique, Catalan wind instrument), has its own unique sound and if that sound does not hurt your ears, you quickly start to have your own favorites, both for dancing and for listening. Yes, listening. They give sardana concerts where you sit in a hall and just listen. Some people – diehards -- attend these.

Going to sardanes is as much a social event as an opportunity to dance and most people come for both. And finally, people enjoy doing their national dance not only because they consider it beautiful or fun or good exercise, but because they weren’t allowed to for so many years. So it’s a little like the difference between going out to a new restaurant every weekend, as opposed to going to your grandmother’s house every week for Sunday dinner. The sardana is definitely Sunday dinner and learning to dance it became an invitation to join the family.

I have danced very seldom since leaving Barcelona, but on this last La Diada (the Catalan national day, 11 September) I went to a nearby village where I had heard there would be sardanes with a live band. It took a bit of poking around sausages, cheeses, and handmade soaps in a medieval-style fair, but I found it. I sat through the first one then joined into the second. I must have said something to this woman because after sitting out the third, she came up to me and asked if I wasn’t going to dance any more, that I danced very well. Her name was Maria and she was from Lleida, a city she said I must visit to see especially the cathedral. Wasn’t that nice? So, the people were friendly, the music was wonderful, and the whole experience reminded me of why I loved it here in Catalunya when I first came. It made me feel alive again.

Catalan Castles

On 11 September 1714 the Catalans, who had supported the Hapsburg claim to the Spanish throne, surrendered to the Bourbon victor. Oddly, this monumental defeat marks the national day of Catalunya. La Diada is celebrated with flags, wreaths commemorating the heroes of that war, speeches, Catalan poetry, and music. Last night I listened to the annual La Diada address of the President of the Generalitat (Catalan government), and later today I plan to go to dance sardanes, the Catalan national dance.


There is talk and there are posters proclaiming that Catalonia is not Spain, and if anything supports that sentiment, the sardana surely does. Compared to the iconic Spanish national dance, flamenco, it is at the opposite end of the dance spectrum. Everyone knows what flamenco music sounds like and what the dance looks like – fiery, almost violent, full of sexual innuendo and manifesting individual pride. Contrast that with the sardana, and you would assume that the two dances came not only from different countries and cultures, but possibly from different planets.

To dance the sardana is to bob up and down, doing one of only two patterns of steps, sometimes with arms down and other times with arms up, in a circle, with no partner required, no evident leader, no individualism, no fire, and definitely no sex. It is staid, some think it is boring, it is danced totally in unison, it has no variety. But when done well, a circle of dancers looks like one living, bobbing organism, and I happen to like that. It is symbolic of what you see a lot of here – community spirit.

Another excellent symbol of community spirit is the uniquely Catalan sport called castells. Castell means castle in Catalan -- you could say these are castles or human towers. The towers can reach as many as ten storeys. Each storey is made of people who have climbed up onto the shoulders of those below while accompanied by the music of gralles, a whiney-sounding flute that sounds like a sick seagull.

Castells are formed on a square base of four very formidable men, who use their arms to lock themselves into an extremely tight position that will directly support the tower. The weight of as many as nine human storeys, each of two, three, or four persons, will go up above them and will bear down directly on them. The core four are then surrounded by others – dozens of people, sometimes over a hundred -- who hold onto them and each other and provide the buttressing to help the four anchors withstand the weight and pressure from above. This construction is called a pinya, literally a pine cone or a pineapple. To fer pinya (make a pinya) means to work or band together towards some common end. Sometimes a second pinya is formed above the first. Bear in mind when you look at the photos that you do not see the base pinya in the sea of people on the ground.

Once the pinya is deemed solid (by the cap de colla, the director or head of the group) the persons who will make the tower begin to scramble up. Storey by storey they set themselves up, each layer climbing up the backs of those before them and doing it all to the traditional music played by a drum and gralles (small wooden flutes). The castle must be made as quickly as possible – the whole thing takes three or four minutes -- for the weight bearing down on those below cannot be withstood for long. The castle is finished when the top person, called an anxaneta who is usually a small child about 7 years old, holds up his or her hand to signal completion, but the whole thing is not concluded until those who went up all climb back down.

When I watch them make castells, whether in person or on television, they give me goose bumps and inevitably make me cry. It’s an incredible cooperative effort, so suspenseful to watch, and I always find it very beautiful and moving.

This is THE typical Catalan sport, unique to Catalunya, and is one of the things that sets it apartment from the rest of Spain where the equivalent sport is to torture and murder bulls. Ironically, I took these photos at a special competition that was held at the Tarragona bullring a few years ago! When I wrote on this blog some months ago about the move here to forbid bullfights, someone posted a comment saying that the Catalans are against bullfights only because they want to appear different from other Spaniards. But I beg to differ. Catalans ARE different. Their national sport, the castells, and their national dance, the sardana, contrasted with bullfighting and flamenco, typical in the rest of Spain, demonstrate that difference perfectly. In both there are no stars, no soloists. Both are cooperative efforts of people doing something together and in the making of castells, it is for the simple pleasure of creating something wonderful that lasts only a moment.

Making castells is a popular sport in Catalunya -- children and mature adults all belong to the teams.  It is not nearly as big as soccer, but important enough to be covered regularly in newspapers and on radio and TV. Many towns have a team, the bigger towns sometimes have more than one. They hold competitions throughout the season where they earn points for the difficulty of the construction and whether or not they put it up and then brought it back down without mishap. They always participate and are a highlight in the festes. Castells are one of the grand cultural manifestations of Catalunya.  There is a video on UTube about the castells, narrated in Catalan, if you don't understand Catalan you can still enjoy the images.  If you want to take a look it is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N6gYDTXk1U