Great minds think alike

I was chatting with one of my students last week about the lack of facilities for tourists in our comarca (district), the Anoia. It is a beautiful area, less than an hour from Barcelona, and yet there has been relatively little done (IMHO) to promote the tourist industry, especially for non-Catalan visitors. I wondered if I should write a short travel guide in English.

I was surprised to find that the editors of La Veu, our local newspaper, had had a similar idea – well, not to write a guide in English, but to publish a three-page special feature in Catalan on local tourism (unfortunately not available on their website).

The initiative of La Veu is all very well, and there is a wealth of interesting information in their feature, but it won't draw in many visitors from outside the district simply because they won't have read it. The district needs new sources of income, especially with local unemployment running at 20%, and tourism seems a better bet than its traditional strong points of leather tanning, paper manufacture and sheep farming.

So, as an native English speaker living in these regions, I shall attempt to use some of my posts to promote the attractions of the area, and some practical advice for those who wish to sample them. As ever, all comments welcome!

On the Perils of Public Moralising

British visitors to Barcelona often come away with the impression that it's a pretty avant-garde sort of place, with lots of trendy shops and hallucinogenic architecture to go with the sunshine and cheap beer. But much of rural Catalonia can be as socially conservative as anywhere this side of the Khyber Pass… today's Periódico brings us this story from the town of Cervera, in central Catalonia.

The Cervera town council has decided that it's time to end the ban on wearing miniskirts in public. At the same time, residents will also be allowed to blaspheme, should they so wish, and even – shock horror! – to run in the street!!!

One might think that such laws dated from the darker days of "National Catholicism", when Franco's hangers-on and suckers-up would do pretty much anything, however silly or pointless, to keep their grubby little hands on power. But no! Said Cervera by-law dates from 1991, just eighteen years ago; well after what most historians deem to be Spain's "transition to democracy". The town council at the time was in the hands of Convergència i Unió, a centre-right party with a strong Christian Democrat wing but usually far from the neofascism which can be found on the extremist edge of the Spanish Catholic Church.

Now Cervera has some claim to being one of the more conservative towns in Catalonia. Philip V considered it trustworthy enough to build a university there in the eighteenth century, just as he was closing every other Catalan institute of higher education on (accurate) suspicions of subversiveness. It is also the seat of a Catholic diocese, whose current incumbent could hardly be described as one of the more progressive of his ilk.

All the same, banning miniskirts in 1991! What were they thinking? To the credit of the common sense of the town and its inhabitants, the by-law has not been enforced recently, and is now being abrogated. Today's politicians should take note the next time they are tempted to play holier than thou instead of resolving the problems which actually affect their electors.

Festa of the Week

One of the great things about living in Catalonia is that there's never any problem with what to do for a weekend. There's always a festa going on somewhere, usually somewhere pretty close. There's a whole site devoted to them, festes.org, which has just celebrated its tenth birthday with the sort of media coverage that would give most bloggers a nightmare, but it's only in Catalan. So, the blog that's more cabra than cabró brings you an irregular "Festa of the Week" feature in something approaching English…

This week we have to leave Capellades and go about eight kilometres in either direction to find the Festa de Sant Crist in Piera or Igualada. We don't like Igualada, so we'll opt for Piera!

''Festa de Sant Crist" translates very roughly as "Holy Christ Party", and is an excuse to keep on celebrating a little bit longer after Easter. You can find the program for Piera here: this year they got the President to open the festivities, followed by free vermouth and music. Frankly, you need alcohol after forcing yourself to stay awake through a speech by Montilla… Throughout the two days of the main festivities there are concerts, dance, theatrical production, a PlayStation tournament and the opportunity to give blood, all washed down with vermouth, the traditional drink of any Catalan festa. There are also about 270 market stalls where you can buy things ranging from fake handbags to goat's milk cheese to a new car. In the good old days, the banks used to arrange mortgages from their little market stalls, but I doubt they'll be much of that this year.

The Sant Crist that we are supposed to be celebrating is a wooden figure of Jesus on the cross, which has been venerated in Piera since the thirteenth century (or since the 1950s, the original having been destroyed during the Civil War, depending on who you believe): you can some arty-type photos here. In any case, the festa has probably always been more commercial than religious: in the days before the internal combustion engine, the shops came to you, not the other way round. On the other hand, they only came a few times a year… These days, I can buy my goat's milk cheese from the supermarket downstairs for a fraction of the price I would be charged at the festa, but I'll still go along to get my free vermouth!

Next week: St. George's Day