La Mercè: Opening Ceremonies

 Every year in Barcelona, this weekend is one of celebration for the Catalan people. La Mercè is a holiday to recognize the feast day of Our Lady of Mercy, an important saint in Catalonia. (Yes, I totally have a Wikipedia window open on my computer right now.) I had no idea what to expect for the festival, but I had heard from numerous people that this was a weekend that must be spent in Barcelona. They were so right.

       The festivities on Friday night were really the first time I got a taste of the intense tradition here. The opening celebration of La Mercè consisted of gegants, castells, music, dancing, and fireworks. Plaza Sant Jaume was overwhelmed with people of all ages, all surrounding a wide stage flanked by a larger one where the orchestra was seated. 

As the band played music, enormous animal figures were brought to the stage one at a time and traditional dances were performed. These included dragons, a lion, a horse, un toro (a bull), and some sort of bird. A partridge maybe? Anyways, here they all are, most with firecrackers in their mouth which exploded unexpectedly.

Another main feature of Catalan celebrations are gegants, enormous paper mache human figurines that, in my opinion, were quite terrifying. Besides being quite impressive on sight, these figures also did traditional dances-impressive in it's own right because they are held up by one very strong person. Ironically, despite my lifelong fear of costumes and characters, the King and Queen's performance was my favorite part of the ceremony. They were paraded out onto the stage and did a dance together, dipping and stepping in tune with the music. You could tell they were having a conversation with each other through the movements. What this means, I am not entirely sure, but I do know they represent the royals from when Catalonia was an independent kingdom. 

The final famous aspect of festivals in Barcelona are castells, or human towers. We have been told repeatedly that these are a spectacle we simply had to see. At the opening night, we were a little disappointed, because we were stuck behind hundreds of people and couldn't really get a good view. (All of these pictures were literally taken by holding my camera way above my head and hoping for the best. Hence the quality.) One thing we had been sort of excited about the whole time was that we were brushing shoulders with a whole group of people dressed all in white with red bands around their stomachs, some of the little kids wearing helmets that said BARCELONA on them in clear letters. We knew they were probably a human tower team.

We noticed they had a little diagram they seemed to be studying. "That's odd," we thought, "Shouldn't they have planned this out a littler earlier than right now?"

Suddenly, they all clustered together. We were ushered by guards who appeared out of no where to take a few steps back. A human tower was erupting right next to us! I managed to snap a picture in all the chaos:

And here it is in completion (the top 3 levels, anyway. They put little kids up there):

The excitement didn't stop with that. All of those animals, gegants, and traditional dancers starting parading through the crowd and we were pushed even farther to the side. But that didn't mean we weren't up close. This picture was taken without zoom:

See the firecrackers in his mouth? A dragon came by next, and his lovely sparklers exploded right in front of us. I faced two of my childhood fears at La Mercè: loud noises and scary costumes.

After the parade ended, I thought the pomp and circumstance was over. Wrong. Fireworks started shooting off of the roof of the building next to us. We were thrilled at first, until little shards of firework pieces started hitting us in the face and getting stuck in our eyes. We were all tearing up as we watched the colors shatter over the night sky in Barcelona.