Catalonia is a place with a very rich and diverse culture, and with century-old traditions that are unique in the world. In this post, we want to share some of them with you and explain their meanings, so that when you visit Barcelona you know everything there is to know about its impressive culture. Correfocs Often the highlight of Catalan (and Balearic) festivals, the correfoc harks back to medieval times. Correfoc literally means “fire run” and it’s basically a firework ...

Festival of Santa Eulàlia Santa Eulàlia is Barcelona’s patron saint. On February the 12th celebrations, and a public holiday, are to be held in her honour (Santa Eulália was a 13-year-old martyr who was tortured on the orders of the emperor Diocletian, and she is often referred to as the children’s saint). Eulália lends her name to Barcelona’s impressive gothic Cathedral – Santa Eulália – though it is more commonly referred to as La Seu. A day of street celebrations and parades is ...

Mecal Air is an open air festival of international short and animation films that takes place every year in Barcelona, this year being the 9th edition. With more than 5500 short films submitted and 350 works screened in the last edition, Mecal has become one of the most important festivals of shorts and animation both in Europe and internationally, it represents a unique opportunity to see the best new short films made here in Spain as well as abroad. So you head from 20:30 to 23:30 to the ...

As any visitor to Barcelona will quickly discover, Catalunya has its own language, Catalan with a long and proud history. Indeed, the oldest known surviving book in the Iberian peninsula is in Catalan, a medieval recipe book. Catalunya is also the centre of Spain’s publishing industry and home to most of its major publishing houses. The Catalan love of literature is symbolised nowhere better than on Sant Jordi, the day of Catalunya’s patron saint (Saint Jordi will be familiar to English ...