Human Tower Teams (Castellers)

The form grew out of the Ball dels Valencians, a folk dance first documented in Valls, near Tarragona, in 1712, whose finale was a small human tower. Through the late 18th century that closing figure grew taller and more elaborate until it broke away from the dance and became a performance in its own right. In Valls a rivalry between a colla rooted in farmers and one rooted in craftsmen pushed each to outbuild the other, seeding the two ancestral colles that still perform there today. UNESCO inscribed castells on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on 16 November 2010.

Your first night is a rehearsal in a bare hall, and you will almost certainly start in the pinya, the packed human base, where the job is to lock arms around the people ahead of you and push in hard toward the center. Nobody expects you to climb, and nobody minds that you have never done this: a veteran sizes you up, walks you to a spot, and tells you exactly whose shoulder to grip. You leave sore across the chest and forearms, having held up strangers who were holding up you.