Gràcia has five festes majors, and the city's page for one of them gives two different months

If you know one thing about Gràcia’s calendar, it is the streets decorated in August. It is one of the best street festivals in Europe and it has become, for visitors, the whole of what Gràcia does.

The district has five festes majors. The August one is a fifth of the story, and the other four are in June, July and September.

The five

Camp d’en Grassot i Gràcia Nova — end of June and beginning of July. A week of it, organised by residents’ associations, traders and social and educational bodies, with much of it around the Centre Cívic la Sedeta. The popular-culture side is a correfoc — run on the first Friday by la Diabòlica de Gràcia — a giants’ procession and a stick-dance display. It opens, after the pregó, with havaneres, burnt rum and coca, which is the most Catalan sentence in this article.

El Coll — first fortnight of June, since a rethink in 2015. Or the second fortnight of September. See below.

Gràcia — August. The famous one, where streets compete on decoration and the neighbourhood argues every year about what it has become.

La Salut — first fortnight of September, feast day 8 September. Street meals, children’s activities, tournaments, music, dancing, film screenings; school giants, sardanes and fireworks.

Vallcarca i els Penitents — first fortnight of September, four days over a weekend, ending on the Onze de Setembre. Centred on the squares of the old core, such as plaça de la Farigola, with havaneres sung on the Sunday afternoon in the little square on avinguda de Vallcarca.

The page that gives two different months

Under its dates heading, the Ajuntament’s page for the Festa major del Coll says:

Second fortnight of September in the neighbourhood of el Coll, district of Gràcia

and, immediately below it, on the same page:

Dates: first fortnight of June

The body text then sides with June: since 2015, el Coll has reformulated its festa major, which is celebrated during the first fortnight of June.

The obvious reading is that the September line is the old date left standing after the change, and that is very likely right. But the page does not say so, and we do not publish reconciliations we invented. We have made that exact mistake before, on this site, more than once.

So: check before you go, and know that the June date is the one the page’s own prose defends.

Each of them is named after something that no longer exists

This is the pattern, and it is worth the walk.

La Salut takes its name from a chapel dedicated to the Mare de Déu de la Salut, built there in 1864. The chapel was attached to the old Casa Morera, and the Ajuntament adds, in passing, that the house no longer exists. The chapel was consecrated and opened to public worship in 1864; the area started being called la Salut; and when a new parish was built nearby, the patronage moved with the name. A district neighbourhood is named after a chapel of a house that is gone.

El Coll takes its name from the hill, which takes its name from an eleventh-century Romanesque church of the Mare de Déu del Coll — also known as la Font-rúbia — a mountain sanctuary at a crossroads between the towns of Gràcia and Horta. The Ajuntament says the area was a hunting ground for feudal lords first and a hiding place for bandits later, and stayed thinly populated until the urban fever of the 1960s took hold of this very steep terrain.

Vallcarca is enclosed in a valley between the hills of the Putget and el Coll. It belonged to the municipality of Horta, not to Gràcia, and had country houses and manors that today have disappeared. And the sentence that explains the whole neighbourhood:

Until the viaduct that bridges the drop was built and the road across the valley was opened, it was a fairly isolated territory.

Els Penitents is further north, divided by the Ronda de Dalt — a neighbourhood cut in two by a ring road.

And Gràcia Nova is a marketing name. The Ajuntament says it flatly: the area is the neighbourhood of Ca l’Alegre de Dalt, called Gràcia Nova for commercial reasons.

We have quoted a lot of municipal prose on this site and that is one of the very few times an institution has written down that a place name is a rebrand. Somebody decided that the name of the district next door would sell better, and the city’s cultural pages simply record it.

What this changes

Gràcia is five neighbourhoods and three of them used to belong to Horta — that is the administrative version of the same fact. The festivals are the lived version, and they are more convincing: five separate communities, five separate dates, five separate patron saints or chapels or hills, and only one of them on the tourist calendar.

It also puts the August festival in proportion. The Festa Major de Gràcia is the one that outgrew its neighbourhood. The other four are what a festa major looks like when it has not.

And they are not the only ones: the district also has Sant Medir on 3 March, which deliberately falls on a working day, and a Mallorcan bonfire festival at the end of January that the city says the neighbours now feel as their own.

How to use it

If you are here in June, July or September, look up whether one of the four is on. They are small, free, mostly in squares, and nobody is running them for you — which is the whole appeal.

Go to the neighbourhood, not to the centre. La Salut is uphill, around Park Güell. El Coll is steeper still. Vallcarca is down in its valley under the viaduct. Camp d’en Grassot is flat and on the Eixample side. Getting to Gràcia is easy and getting around it is not, and these four are the parts of the district that visitors never reach.

And do not expect the August version. No decorated streets, no queues, no lists in guidebooks. Street meals, a bouncy castle, a stick dance and a lot of chairs.

Where this sits on a walk

The old town of Gràcia — the squares, the market, the streets that are the width they are for a reason — is only the middle of the district. The four other festes majors are the edges.

Our Gràcia walk runs daily, morning and evening, in a group of no more than ten. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January.