For the next 5 weeks we’re here in Corçà, a small village somewhere between the city of Girona and the Spanish Costa Brava coast. The old part of the village is hundreds of years old and has a charming character of alleyways and stone built houses.
We arrived just as the village celebrated its annual festival – its festa major. And this is a brief description of the festival – enough perhaps to give you a taste of different lives and the enjoyment that comes from exposure to other cultures.
What a Festa Major actually feels like
At first glance, Corçà’s Festa Major looks like several completely different events accidentally booked for the same weekend.
Church bells ring from the campanar. A rocket is fired in the square. Giant figures process through the streets behind a brass band. There are sardanes, sausages, theatre, bicycles designed for children being raced downhill by adults, a tractor-based tapas crawl, DJs, a solemn Mass, an orchestra, a children’s park and, a week later, an entire gathering devoted to giants.
It makes more sense once you stop thinking of the Festa Major as a festival put on for the village.
It is the village, temporarily turned inside out.
The repic de campanes, the peal of bells that begins the weekend, is an old signal that ordinary time has stopped. Then comes the cercavila, the street procession, bringing local associations and residents into the public space together. The firing of the opening rocket makes the point rather more emphatically.
And then the gegants arrive.
Catalonia’s festival giants are enormous human figures carried by people hidden inside them, each with its own name and local identity. Corçà has Lluís and Julià, alongside the smaller gegantons Sra. Irene and Jordi. They do not function like theme-park characters. They belong to the town. They appear at its festivals, dance to traditional music and travel to gatherings where one town’s giants meet those of another.
On the following weekend Corçà holds its 29th Trobada Gegantera — literally a meeting of giant-bearers — with the figures assembled before another procession through the village. It is difficult to imagine a more literal representation of local identity walking down the street.
The sardana belongs to the same world. It is a circle dance, accompanied here by a cobla, the distinctive Catalan ensemble of wind instruments, brass and double bass. Visitors sometimes treat it as folklore to be watched. That misses something. Its significance is partly that people can join the circle. The choreography is precise, but the basic image is wonderfully simple: a group holding hands in a public square.
There is also food, inevitably.
Friday evening’s botifarrada popular is built around botifarra, the Catalan sausage, but the important word may be popular: communal. Eight euros buys the sausage and a drink and, more importantly, a place among everybody else eating in the square.
Saturday’s Tractor Tapes takes the principle somewhere considerably less ancient: a gastronomic route involving tractors, music, tapas and what the programme rather ominously promises will be “many surprises”. Catalan tradition is perfectly capable of taking itself seriously; it is equally capable of attaching a brass band to something on wheels.
That coexistence of old and new runs through the weekend. Sardanes are followed by a DJ truck. A solemn Sunday Mass in honour of Sant Julià and Santa Basilissa shares the programme with an evening dance orchestra. Traditional giants appear in the same festival as a youth night ending at half past three in the morning.
None seems to cancel the other out.
The part a visitor can easily miss
Perhaps the most revealing words in the programme are not the names of the acts at all.
They are “organitza” and “gestionat per” — organised by, managed by.
The mountain-bike club runs a bar. The skating club lights the opening rocket and later runs another bar. The women’s group makes sandwiches. The youth organisation handles drinks at the late-night events. The giant-bearers organise their own gathering.
This is the machinery beneath a Festa Major.
Catalan towns and villages have a dense network of associations, clubs, cultural groups and voluntary organisations. A festival gives all of them a part to play. Participation is therefore not limited to turning up and watching. People carry giants, serve food, play music, arrange tables, run bars and marshal events.
Even the Saturday-night Punt Lila says something about how the tradition is evolving. The “purple point” provides information and support around harassment and sexual violence during the late-night festivities. It sits in the same programme as giants and sardanes without any apparent sense of contradiction: an old communal festival adapting to contemporary expectations of what looking after the community means.
That may be the most interesting thing about the Festa Major.
It survives not because somebody has preserved it behind glass, but because people keep finding new reasons to use it.
What would the British equivalent be?
There isn’t really one.
Imagine combining a village fête, parish patronal festival, carnival procession, brass-band concert, ceilidh, church service, food festival, youth-club disco and Bonfire Night, then running them over a weekend and expecting much of the village to help organise them.
You would be getting close.
Britain certainly has fragments of the same culture. Village fêtes rely on volunteers. Morris dancing maintains local traditions. Carnival towns build elaborate processions. Brass bands remain woven into the identity of parts of northern England. Scottish communities have ceilidhs and Highland games. Many villages still organise events through churches, sports clubs, WI branches and community associations.
What feels different in a Catalan Festa Major is how comfortably these things still occupy the centre of public life.
The square is not merely a venue hired for an event. It is where the village meets. Streets are temporarily reclaimed from their normal purpose. Children, teenagers, parents and grandparents are not necessarily given separate festivals: they appear on the same programme.
A British village fête can sometimes feel like something arranged on Saturday afternoon between lunch and tea.
Corçà begins by ringing the church bells and firing a rocket and does not finally finish until the giants have had their vermouth the following weekend.
There is a certain confidence in that.
The pleasure of being slightly outside it
For a visitor, there is also value in not understanding everything immediately.
You do not need to know the history of every giant or master the steps of the sardana. You can stand in the square, watch the procession arrive and notice who knows whom. You can eat a botifarra at a trestle table. You can observe teenagers helping run the same festival their grandparents are attending.
That is a different kind of sightseeing.
No monument has been opened specially for you. Nobody has staged a demonstration of “Catalan culture” because tourists are present.
The village was going to do this anyway.
And for a few days, you are allowed to stand inside it.