[Article] Gràcia Fest

Gràcia Fest
Posted by Jessica in Barcelona; Events on 21/Oct/2006

If you happen to find yourself halfway across the world in mid-August, preferably with a sense of adventure and an affinity for insomnia, I'd advise heading to Barcelona and joining in on the annual revelries of the Gràcia Fest. Every August from the 15th to the 21st, Catalans return from their luxuriously long summer vacations and the small barrio of Gràcia plays host to one of the most vibrant neighborhood festivals in Europe.

The Gràcia Fest is basically a hyperbole of a block party- events and feasts are scheduled all throughout the day, live music persists every night until dawn, and outdoor bars and their patrons make it impossible to cross even the smallest square in under ten minutes. Every year, over a million people flood the narrow streets of Gràcia to gawk and to party until literally flooded out by street cleaners in the morning...

Read the rest of:
http://www.sitebits.com/2006/gracia_fest_barcelona.html

Too bad Alban, Ree and myself missed the event by a few days... The Castellers thing sounds sufficiently crazy. Pretty difficult to imagine how one would pick up a hobby like this... Well, I guess the same can be said about people who drill holes in 50cm ice to go swimming in the winter...

This tradition originated at the end of the 18th century in Valls, Tarragona, when rival groups of people called "colles", began to compete in constructing the different kinds of human towers that we recognise nowadays...

http://www.castellersdebarcelona.org/

Very cool story/event! Would love to check that out someday. So, do all Barcelonians (Barcelonos?) go to this one neighborhood to party it up, or do other neighborhoods have their own block parties?