Castellers: Eight Colles in Barcelona, and a Way of Understanding the Neighbourhood

Barcelona has eight neighbourhood colles castelleres, and watching a diada is free: it's a performance in the street, usually in a square, with two or three guest colles taking turns to build castells. They're usually tied to each neighbourhood's Festa Major, such as Santa Eulàlia in February and La Mercè in September.

Seeing a castell up close for the first time is disorienting. Two hundred people packed together forming a base, and on top of them six, seven, eight storeys of people climbing over each other's shoulders, with a helmeted child crowning the very top. What you can't see from outside is the most important part: this isn't done by a team of acrobats, it's done by a neighbourhood club where people sign up, train two evenings a week, and know each other by name. Barcelona has eight colles, and watching a diada is free.

A World Heritage tradition since 2010

UNESCO added castells to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on 16 November 2010. It's not a decorative label: it recognises that what matters isn't the tower itself but the social practice that sustains it — organised people of every age doing this every week, in the same place.

In 2025 the colles marked the fifteenth anniversary of that declaration at the MNAC. Right now in Barcelona things are going well: the city's colles describe their current state of health as as good as it gets.

Barcelona's colles

Barcelona now has eight neighbourhood colles — human-tower clubs (in 2010, with the Colla Jove, there were six). Among them: Castellers de Barcelona (1969), Castellers de Sants (1993), Castellers de la Vila de Gràcia (1997), Castellers del Poble Sec (1999), Castellers de la Sagrada Família (2002), Colla Jove de Barcelona (2010), and the Colla Castellera de l'Esquerra de l'Eixample (2018). Each one belongs to its own neighbourhood, with its own clubhouse and its own coloured shirt.

The Vila de Gràcia colla is a good example of how these clubs come to be: it formed in 1996 out of a group of young people from the neighbourhood, made its first public appearance at the Santa Eulàlia diada in 1997, and officially presented itself on 4 May by completing its first six-tier castells. Today it builds eight-tier ones. The city's oldest colla brought back nine-tier castells a couple of years ago.

What a diada is, and how to watch one

A diada is a performance, usually held in a square, with two or three guest colles taking turns to build castells. They're held in the street, free to watch, and usually tied to each neighbourhood's Festa Major: Santa Eulàlia in February, La Mercè in September, and each neighbourhood's own festival throughout the year.

What's worth watching isn't only what's happening up top. The pinya — the crowd of people forming the base — is where half the work happens, and where anyone who steps in and pushes can take part. And pay attention to the end: a castell isn't judged for going up, it's judged for coming down whole. ‘Descarregat’ means it came down clean; ‘carregat’ means it was crowned but collapsed on the way down.

You can join in

This is what almost nobody knows: the colles are open. You can go to a practice session, watch, and stay. You don't need to be from here, or speak Catalan, or be in good shape — what's needed is people for the pinya, which is where everyone starts, and the more people there are at the base, the safer the whole thing is.

For anyone spending a few months in Barcelona who wants to meet real locals rather than just other newcomers, this is the widest door there is in the city. Two evenings a week in a neighbourhood clubhouse, doing something physical alongside fifty other people, does more for settling in than a year of apps.