Festa Major de Gràcia: instructions, from someone who has to walk through it

Mid-August, a week, free, in the street. Whole streets in Gràcia cover themselves from the pavement to the fourth floor — a ceiling of hand-made scenery hung across the road — and then compete against the street round the corner. It is not hired in, it is not sponsored scenery, and it is not made by a production company. The people who live in the street make it.

What follows is a set of instructions, in the order you will need them.

Check the dates before you book anything. They sit around 15 August and they move. We are not printing this year’s on a page that will still be here in three years.

Go during the day at least once. The decoration is the point and it is built to be looked at from directly underneath, which you cannot do in a crowd of three deep at midnight. Late morning is empty. Six in the evening is manageable.

Start at the top and walk down. Gràcia slopes. Coming up from Diagonal in August, in that heat, through that many people, is a decision you will regret by the second street.

Look up, then look at the joins. From a distance it reads as spectacle. Close up you can see what it is made of, which is mostly things that were something else first, and that is the part that is genuinely hard to believe.

Expect to queue to enter a street. The busy ones get regulated in single file. This is not bureaucracy, it is the only way the street stays passable.

Do not plan to eat quickly. Everything is full. Everything has been full since two o’clock.

Remember what is above the decoration. The fourth-floor windows behind that ceiling of scenery are bedrooms, and the people in them have a week of noise ahead. They built the thing you are photographing. There is a line between being welcome and being a problem and it is drawn at about the volume of your own voice at one in the morning.

Do not judge Gràcia by this week. Festa Major is the neighbourhood turned up to maximum with the whole city inside it. Charming, exhausting, and a very poor sample. If you want to know what the place is like when it is being itself, that is what to see in Gràcia and the squares, on an ordinary Tuesday — and an ordinary Tuesday, hour by hour, which is the neighbourhood the other fifty-one weeks run on.

Why a town holds a festival like this

Because Gràcia was a town. It was an independent municipality with its own mayor from 1850 until Barcelona annexed it by royal decree on 20 April 1897, and a festa major is what a town holds: its own festival week, organised by the streets themselves and judged against each other. The city grew around it and the format never changed hands.

The long version of how that town worked, and how badly it took the annexation, is in why Gràcia was its own town.

What we have left out on purpose

The exact dates, the winning streets, and the programme. All three change every year, all three are published by the organisers shortly beforehand, and a stale version of any of them is worse than none.

Our Gràcia walking tour runs the rest of the year as well as this week, and in August it goes through a neighbourhood that is busy being a village. Ten people, three hours, ending with vermouth in a celler.

The city’s own official version of the same apparatus — giants, big-heads, a bestiary and a written protocol for who walks in what order — is down in Ciutat Vella, and almost every figure in it was carved between 1987 and 1998: the giants and the correfoc.

If you are weighing up August against the rest of the year, the numbers on both sides — heat, rain, thunderstorms, hotel occupancy — are in when to go to Barcelona.