A baker in Gràcia made a promise in 1828, and the neighbourhood has been throwing sweets at itself ever since

Barcelona has a festival where people stand in the street holding out buckets and upturned umbrellas while riders on horseback throw industrial quantities of boiled sweets at them.

It happens in Gràcia, on 3 March, on a weekday, and almost no visitor has heard of it — partly because it is in the wrong month for a city break, and partly because the Gràcia festival everyone has heard of is the one in August.

They are not the same thing and they are not even the same kind of thing.

It started with one man’s private vow

The Ajuntament’s cultural pages trace it exactly:

The origin of the festival of Sant Medir is found in Gràcia, and specifically in a promise made in 1828 by the baker Josep Vidal i Granés, who had his business on carrer Gran.

He said that if a health problem was resolved, he would go on pilgrimage to the hermitage of Sant Medir every year.

He started that year. Then, in the city’s own phrasing, relatives, friends and more groups of people gradually joined, and they later organised themselves into colles.

That is the whole origin. Not a guild, not a parish, not a municipal decision. One baker on the main street of what was then an independent town, keeping a promise, and the town joining in until it became institutional.

Gràcia does this. It is the same instinct that built the neighbourhood’s clubs and its choral societies when it joined Barcelona in 1897 with almost no public buildings: something needs doing, so a group of neighbours does it and gives itself a name.

The beans

Here is the detail that makes the whole thing make sense.

On the first parades home from the pilgrimage, the baker

threw broad beans at the public as a homage to the saint, who — according to the legend — sowed them.

Because the legend is about beans. Sant Medir, in the version the Ajuntament tells, was a farmer living in the Collserola hills near Sant Cugat. In the year 303, during Diocletian’s persecution, the bishop Sever of Barcelona was fleeing the city, came across Medir sowing broad beans, explained why he was hiding and — determined to die rather than renounce his faith — asked him to tell the truth if anyone asked. After the bishop had gone, the beans grew miraculously. When the pursuers came upon Medir he told them the truth: Sever had passed by a while ago, while he was sowing beans. They assumed he was mocking them and protecting the bishop, and took him away. Both were imprisoned and martyred.

So the sweets thrown at your head in Gràcia in March are broad beans, four times removed. Over the years the beans were replaced by sweets —

to the point that today the celebration is called the sweet festival.

What actually happens

Morning. The colles come out and parade through the streets of the neighbourhood, in order of seniority, before setting off on the pilgrimage.

Midday. The colles of Gràcia, Sarrià and la Bordeta reach the hermitage of Sant Medir, where a mass is held.

Eight in the evening. The colles come back, and this is the big one — the Ajuntament calls it the busiest procession, with adults and children filling the streets of the neighbourhood to see the colles and collect as many sweets as they can, equipped with bags, buckets and umbrellas.

The umbrella is not a joke. It is the standard tool.

Every colla is organised identically, by protocol: led by the cos de bandera, which is three riders on a horse and the banner that identifies the colla, carried by the standard-bearer.

The rule that tells you whose festival it is

The tradition is that Sant Medir is celebrated on a working day, both in Gràcia and in Sarrià - Sant Gervasi, so that if 3 March falls on a Sunday, the festival is moved to the 4th.

Read that twice. Most festivals move towards the weekend. This one moves away from it.

A festival that insists on being on a Tuesday is a festival for the people who live there. Nobody is scheduling this for visitors, and the effect is that Sant Medir has stayed what it was: a neighbourhood doing something for itself on a day off work that most of them have had to take.

It is the clearest single answer to a question this journal keeps circling — what makes Gràcia different from the rest of Barcelona, and why residents there score their own neighbourhood the way they do.

What to do if you are here in early March

Do not plan a route. Stand on a main street of Gràcia in the evening and wait. The Ajuntament’s own description of the eight o’clock procession is the plan.

Bring something to catch with. Everyone else will have.

Go and look at the monument first. In plaça de Trilla there is a monument to the Sant Medir colles by Núria Tortras, from 1969, and on the third Sunday of February there is a floral offering there. Most people who watch the parade have never noticed the statue.

And know that it is not only Gràcia. Sarrià-Sant Gervasi and la Bordeta have their own colles and their own parades — la Bordeta always on the Sunday after the feast day. Gràcia is where it started and where it is biggest.

⚠️ We are not printing a timetable. The times shift, the route shifts, the colles decide. The Ajuntament’s own page is the place to check the year you come, and it is linked at the foot of this one.

And a note on what a festival is for

The two Gràcia festivals answer each other. The Festa Major in August is the one that gets photographed, and it has grown to a scale that the neighbourhood argues about every year. Sant Medir is on a Tuesday in March, in the cold, and nobody has ever had to write an article about how to survive the crowds at it.

If you want to understand why Gràcia behaves like a town rather than a district, the baker’s promise is a better starting point than the annexation date.

Where this sits on a walk

The festival runs along carrer Gran de Gràcia — the old main street, where the baker had his shop — and through the squares that organise the neighbourhood.

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.