Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
DECEMBER
Fira de Santa Llúcia
Dec 1-22.
For more than two hundred years the Christmas season has
seen a special market and crafts fair outside the cathedral. Browse for gifts or watch the loc-
als snapping up Christmas trees, Nativity figures and traditional decorations.
Nadal/Sant Esteve
Dec 25-26
bcn.cat/nadal
.
Christmas Day and St Stephen's Day are
both public holidays, which Catalans tend to spend at home - the traditional gift-giving is on
Twelfth Night (Jan 6). Each year, there's a Christmas Nativity scene erected in Pl. de Sant
Jaume, Barri Gòtic, which stays there for the whole of Dec and the first week in Jan.
CELEBRATING CATALAN-STYLE
Central to any Catalan festival is the parade of
gegants
, the overblown five-metre-high gi-
ants with a costumed frame (to allow them to be carried) and papier-mâché or fibreglass
heads. Barcelona has its own official city gegants of King Jaume and his queen (there's
moreat
gegantsbcn.cat
),whileeachneighbourhoodcherishesitsowntraditionalfigures,
from elegant noblewomen to turban-clad sultans - the Barri Gòtic's church of Santa
Maria del Pi has some of the most renowned. Come festival time they congregate in the
city's squares, dancing cumbersomely to the sound of flutes and drums, and accompan-
ied by smaller, more nimble figures known as
capgrossos
(bigheads) and by outsized
lions and dragons. Also typically Catalan is the
correfoc
(fire-running), where brigades of
drummers, fire-breathing dragons and demons with firework-flaring tridents cavort in the
streets. It's as devilishly dangerous as it sounds, with intrepid onlookers attempting to stop
the dragons passing, as firecrackers explode all around - approach with caution.
