Human Tower Building at Castells Competition in Tarragona
The Tarragona Human Tower Competition is an annual sporting
event carried out by the best teams in the country and it is held every
two years in Tarragona, a city in Spain's Catalonia region about 50
miles southwest of Barcelona. Nearly 6000 spectators gathered at an old
bull ring in Tarragona on the first weekend of October over the weekend
for its annual castells competition, where teams made of up to hundreds
of people collaborate to build human towers. Leading teams compete
against each other for the first place in different categories where
towers are scored on difficulty.
Building human towers, or
castells, is an old Catalan tradition dating back over two hundred
years. Each castell (a Catalan word for castle) is built by a team,
called a colla, consisting of between 75 to 500 men and women. Young and
light members form the top of a tower while heavier members form the
base. Music plays as a team erects its tower, usually between six and
ten levels high.
The event is popular with both locals and
tourists and has been declared part of the Representative List of the
Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
Members
of the Colla 'Caprogossos de Mataro' climb up as they construct a human
tower during the 24th Tarragona Castells Comptetion on Oct. 7, in
Tarragona, Spain. The 'Castellers' who build the human towers with
precise techniques compete in groups, known as 'colles', at local
festivals with aim to build the highest and most complex human tower.
The Catalan tradition is believed to have originated from human towers
built at the end of the 18th century by dance groups and is part of the
Catalan culture.
