Members of Trobada de Falcons begin building towers in the streets of Perpignan the afternoon of June 26th.
When looking through Google images of Perpignan it is easy to imagine a quiet town in the South of France, where every day is sunny and only “Bonjour” echoes off the cobblestone streets. The atmosphere these tranquil images evokes makes the constant bustle of activity in the town’s city center come as a surprise.
Within the first few minutes I spent wandering Perpignan it became apparent that something is almost always happening here: a wedding, a street performance, a market, a parade, or a festival.
Certainly, Perpignan seems to be home to many festivals, and as tourism is the city’s main economic industry it is easy to understand why. A glance at a local events calender left my head swimming with the multitudes of parades, theater, dance and music performances scheduled for June and July as part of The Festa Major and Le festival d’été Perpignan.
On our first morning in town, it was a disappointment when I came across a poster advertising a performance by Diada Castellera, a troupe of human castle builders, with “Samedi 19 Juin” (Saturday June 19) written along the bottom.
A Catalan tradition dating back hundreds of years ago, a castellera is a team of men, women and children who work together to create towers or castles out of their bodies.
“What a thing that would have been to see,” I thought, “a tower built from men standing five or six atop each others’ shoulders.”
Later that day I saw a large crowd of people gathered under the archway of the Castillet in the town’s city center. They were dressed in white pants and shirts with fringed sashes of blue and black wrapped around their waists. A six-person band made up of flutes and a drum began to play as the group moved through the archway and into the nearby plaza.
I paused along the street looking on with slight confusion when the group stopped and began to remove their sandals. Suddenly, without introduction, pairs of men and women dropped to their hands and knees. My excitement soared as I realized this was a troupe of castelleras and they were going to perform right here in the street!
Quickly, more and more pairs of men and women began to interlace themselves together, standing on the backs and shoulders of those on the ground until they formed tall vertical towers reaching four or five stories high. A smaller group member, often a child wearing a safety helmet, would then climb delicately up their partners’ backs and balance at the top of the tower.
Trobada de Falcons begins to make their way through the crowd at the end of their performance.
During the short performance the massive group of castellers divided and built three or four human castles at the same time. Some of the castles appeared to be in traditional tower shapes with others being more complex and horizontal, giving the illusion that one man was holding up three or four people.
The troupe, whose name I later discovered was Trobada de Falcons, performed at Place de la Republique as one of the closing events of Perpignan’s Festa Major.
Just as quickly as they had begun, the group rearranged themselves into tall, skinny towers, stacked three people high, and the troupe began to weave their way down the street. My breath caught in my throat as I watched each human tower sway left and right in the air over the heads of the crowd until the performers disappeared out of sight.
As my time here progresses it becomes clear that while Perpignan may appear a quiet and unassuming town in images, the city is in reality quiet lively with a constant bubbling of French and Catalan activities and traditions.
