We booked 6 nights in Tarragona during the festival of Concurs de Castells. We were hoping to see some of human tower competition that is held here in Tarragona every other year. If you haven’t heard of it, they create teams of 200-300 people and see how high they can create a human tower. The larger people form a huge base on the ground and they start a building tower of people that can get up to 10 levels high. The upper levels are skinnier athletic men and women and they put a few 6 year olds to form the last couple of levels. They put helmets on the kids so its safe :>) Unfortunately, the tickets sold out last July for this weekend’s big competition. The arena only holds 6000 people and 90,000 people put their name in for the lottery to get tickets.
So we were left out. But…. there were a lot of castell building demonstrations and practices for the competition going on in Tarragona for those of us that didn’t have tickets. Unfortunately, the rain started falling. It really came down and started a lot of floods around the region for a couple of days. All the castell building practice was cancelled except for the actual competitions inside the covered arena. I guess you really shouldn’t be building human towers when everyone is wet and slippery. We have been lucky to see many surprise festivals all over the world since we retired, so I guess it is OK that we got unlucky this week. We did walk around town all weekend to see all the fans in their teams colors really excited to support their team. We ended up watching the finals on TV, and came away with a great appreciation for the sport. The traditions, the intensity, the engineering, the athleticism and the number of athletes of both genders make it a super interesting cultural happening. The best part is the community spirit with so many people emotionally behind their neighborhood’s team.
The rain also interfered a bit with us seeing the rest of the town like we wanted. Luckily we did have 6 nights here so we had lots of breaks in the weather to check things out. We did book a “free” walking tour on the worst day. We are from Seattle and aren’t really afraid of the rain, but we ended up having to endure a 2 and a half hour walking tour where the skies just opened up. Everything got wet including my wallet and all my money…
Besides the rain…. we really like Tarragona. It seems that we have been through a lot of cities in this trip that we liked but Tarragona just seemed a step above for us. It has beautiful 18th and 19th century buildings but it was filled with Roman stuff. A forum, a theater, old walls, a circus stadium, and just old rocks everywhere. We have seen a lot of Roman towns in many different countries, but this one overlooking the Med looked a bit more special. It was one of those places that had so much Roman stuff that it just became normal. Kids were playing soccer using old Roman arches as the goals.
It was the original home of Chartreuse liqueur and they had it on many menus even though it is now a bit rare to find in the rest of the world. The monks don’t make it here anymore but it is still seen as a Tarragona drink. It was a tourist town, but we only got 1 cruise ship a day and they were usually gone by 2pm. It is always nice when the big tourist groups leave and we feel like we have the town to ourselves. We enjoyed many meals eating cheap tapas and drinks over slow meals in the ancient plazas. It is easy to get used to….
We stayed in a very old building on the 4th floor in the most historic part of town. We were in the Roman part of town and had tour groups stopping to see the old Roman headstones that were re-used to build the building across the street. It was fun to hang out over the balcony to see all the action during the rain storms as well as the locals heading to the castells competition. Our Airbnb reminded us of a place we stayed in Catania, Sicily a few years ago. It is hard to tell how old it is but if they are using old Roman stones as bricks, you technically could say it is 2000 years old. :>) I would recommend our Airbnb for someone looking for a short stay.
We did one little daytrip during our stay here. We took the train 20 minutes away to the town of Reus. It is famous for being the birthplace of Antoni Gaudi who is famous as being the architect of the Sagrada Familia as well as a few other buildings and parks in Barcelona. We visited the Gaudi museum and saw the Art Nouveau buildings of Reus and can now understand a bit about how Gaudi was inspired to do his revolutionary architecture. Gaudi’s work is not Art Nouveau but it is definitely related. Reus was another town with several squares filled with tapas bars that only locals eat at. I don’t think the cruise ship tourists get to Reus. This town is also the Spanish home of Vermouth (called Vermut in Spain). Sweet Red Vermouth is the standard for the local bars and is really cheap. Often just 6-8 euros for 2 glasses with a bowl of potato chips and some olives.
We have one more stop in Spain before leaving Europe. We are heading for one of the many beach towns near Barcelona for some more vermut sipping on the waterfront over looking the sea. We are planning a relaxing week but sometimes we end up exploring :>) We will see. Next stop- Vilanova I La Geltru