Towers Of Strength: Human castles

Certain sports are local to regions or towns. In the Highlands of Scotland they toss a caber, at Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire they roll cheese, in Ashbourne they play a game of football that can last eight hours, at Eton they play a wall game during which they never score goals, in the Basque Country they created pelota, and in Catalonia they clamber on top of each other and build human towers aka human castles. Unlike other local or regional sports, the human towers are so culturally important, no doubt to a Catalonian delight, that they have been designated by UNESCO as being part of the intangible heritage of humanity, in the same way as the Mallorcan Sibil·la chant has been.

Last weekend, the biennial human towers competition was held in the bullring in Tarragona. There is an irony in the competition being staged in a bullring. Catalonia has banned the bullfight, a sport considered symbolic of Spain, yet uses the bullfight arena for a sport symbolic of Catalonia. It is perhaps as well that they don't try and combine the two. The potential for mayhem would be enormous.

The Tarragona two-day tournament is broadcast on television. It comes with full commentary and slow-motion replays which are particularly useful for analysing any slip by the small child who is meant to get to the top of the tower (and they do sometimes slip). The arena is packed with members of competing towers, identifiable by their team colours, the terraces with supporters, many of whom, this being Catalonia, brandish suitably pro-Catalonia banners: "Catalonia is not Spain" and such like.

The Catalonian prime minister Artur Mas was one of this year's spectators; he would have been heartened by the calls for independence from the teams ("collas") and spectators. There is nothing more Catalonian than the human towers competition and no better an opportunity to broadcast Catalonian solidarity to the rest of Spain (and to the rest of the world, some of which will have been tuning in).

It takes considerable solidarity on behalf of the members of the collas to keep the towers together. It also demands courage to build a tower. This combination of solidarity and courage has been used as a metaphor for the current Catalonian struggle for independence. Laura Edgecumbe on the Trans-Iberian blog* concluded her article on the towers (castles) and the Catalan spirit thus: "Upon an ever strengthening base of grassroots support, it's conceivable that the Catalans might just one day build a new architecture on which its children can climb towards a more autonomous future".

Well possibly, but Laura seemed to have taken the whole metaphor idea to its extreme ("the towering success of the Catalan independence movement", "at risk of being toppled"; you get the picture). 

Whatever the strength of the independence movement and the Catalan spirit and however much the human towers might be representative of these, the towers themselves, as with the demand for independence, have travelled in only limited amounts to other Catalan lands. Mallorca has only two collas, the Al·lots of Manacor and the Castellers de Mallorca. If you want another metaphor, then the two tower teams show that there is no real towering wish for a Catalan independence that stretches across the water to the Balearics. And in Mallorca they would not wish to be dominated by Catalonia or by human tower collas that are much stronger than any that could emerge on the island. As with football, so also with human towers; Barcelona dominate at the expense of Real Mallorca, and the Castellers de Vilafranca, winners of this year's tournament, are the Barça of the human tower world.

For photos: http://www.tarragonablog.com/2012/10/08/human-towers-annual-competition-tarragona/

* For Laura Edgecumbe's article: http://blogs.elpais.com/trans-iberian/2012/10/human-castles-a-metaphor-for-the-catalan-spirit.html


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