La Mercé is Barcelona's
biggest annual festival. It's pretty much four days of complete craziness in the streets. And little did we know, but the 'main street' of the festival every year is Calle Ferran, our street. So we had a perfect view of all the action! Note: you cannot turn the action off, so there is no point in trying to sleep during Mercé. The view off our balcony looked like this all day and all night.
The party kicked off on Thursday night with some
correfoc (translation: people dress up as demons/devils and dance through the streets while waving wands of fire). Just like in the states, right?
After the correfoc, the
gigantes made their first appearance (translation: giants... of course they aren't just giants, they're dancing giants). Gigantes are very traditional in Catalan festivals. Joe and I were pretty excited the first time we saw them coming down our street. We ran to get the cameras and took a ton of photos because we didn't know if we'd ever see gigantes again. Shortly thereafter we realized the gigantes would be going up and down our street almost hourly over the course of the next 4 days.
Click HERE to watch Gigantes Video 1
Click HERE to watch Gigantes Video 2
Gigantes by day...
Gigantes by night...
Somehow an MJ Thriller Gigante was slipped in amongst all of the 'classics'...
Other popular parts of Mercé included lots of bands, fireworks, dance competitions, and
Casteller competitions (translation: human tower competitions). See our blog from September for videos and photos of castellers.
So now who wants to crash at our place for Mercé 2010?!?!?!?
That is kind of weird.
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