A room in Can Papiol house-museum in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Penedès, Catalonia).
Since the year 1790 and throughout the 19th century, this was the home of one of the wealthiest families in the small city of Vilanova i la Geltrú: the Papiol family, who owned many vineyards around the city. The house has preserved its 19th century interiors, and nowadays it's a house-museum that allows visitors to see what a 19th century upper class family home was like.
The house includes a library with about 6,000 books written between the 16th and the 19th centuries, as well as a music room, a billiard room, a ballroom where the family hosted music parties and literary meetings, a dining room, the bedrooms, a small private chapel, the servants' rooms, areas for servants to do domestic work and for farmers to do their work, stables, and a little Romantic garden.
Sculptor: Josep Campeny i Santamaria (Spanish, 1858-1922)
Architect: Antoni Vila i Palmés (Spanish/Catalan, 1863-1937)
Martinez i Fortuny Company
Panteó August Urrutia i Roldán, 1909
Barcelona, Catalunya
September 20, 2023 - Housing activists and anti-capitalists in Barcelona disrupted "The District", a convention / party for international real estate speculators and other vulture capitalists. The protesters covered many of the attending millionaire scumbag landlords in colourful powder, forcing them to seek safety behind the lines of riot police. [video]/[video]/[video]
People dancing a sardana in la Bisbal de l'Empordà's town square, Catalonia. Video by Amics de la Sardana Terranostra.
This is sardana, a type of music and dance from Catalonia often considered Catalonia's national dance.
The music for the sardanes is always played by a cobla, a specific music ensamble consisting of 11 musicians playing 12 instruments with a predominance of wind instruments.
There are many songs of the sardana genre, all of which share the same beat. For this reason, the same handful of dance steps can be used for all songs. The dance is easy on purpose, so that everyone can join. It consists of two basic steps called the “short step” and the “long step”, and it’s always danced in circle holding hands.
The circle represents friendship, harmony, fraternity and solidarity among everyone who joins to hold hands.
People dancing sardanes in Northern Catalonia. Photos from the article “Sardane, une ronde fraternelle en Pays Catalan” by Béatrice Bantegny on Visit PO.
In the late 19th century, authorities (government and religious) condemned the sardana for being immoral because it meant that men and women who aren’t relatives were holding hands, but it was too popular to control it. During Franco’s fascist dictatorship of Spain (1939-1978), some sardana songs were banned because they were considered too Catalan (one of the pillars of Spanish fascism was/is Catalanophobia, the dictatorship wanted to exterminate the Catalan language, culture, and identity and impose the Spanish one instead).
But sardanes kept being danced through all of it and nowadays you can still find that a cobla plays in most towns during its local festivities, and everyone can join and dance. Though in most of Catalonia this dance is now associated with elderly people, in the Comarques Gironines it's particularly beloved. In the Empordà area, you can often find it in summer evenings.