Saint John's fire burns close to the church of Riudaura, Spain. Date: 23/06/2018. Photo: Xabier Mikel Laburu. Despite Saint John is celebrated in the rest of Spain, this festivity has became a Catalan nationalistic festivity when, for the first time in 1955, and inspired by a poem from Jacint Verdaguer called Canigo (1886), Francesc Pujada with two other would start the tradition to lighten a fire on the Canigo mountain top and use that fire to lighten all the fires of the Catalan territory.
Beyond the boundaries of Barcelona and the metropolitan area, between the mountains and the far west plains, in those stone and brick villages where the ancient traditions are still visible behind the veil of modernity, is where one can find the hard core sentiment of Catalan nationalism. Villages where the industrial revolution seems to have forgotten about their existence long time ago and their economies depend mainly of traditional farming. Villages which, not so long ago, started to embrace city refugees, whom, with their new perspectives, at times have created a symbiotic relationship between the old order and a new one which is pushing hard. A world of tractors and cellphones, cows and laptops, sinuous roads and Internet, is also the home of a nationalism that has switched from a comfortable traditionalism to a somewhat more revolutionary political thought. Situated on the north-east of the Iberian peninsula, Catalonia occupies a territory similar to Holland and has a bit more than million inhabitants. Close to 70% of its territory is considered rural and agricultural, but following the XX century migrations to the large cities where industry and commerce thrived, these regions only account for about the 30% of the total population today. But this demographic balance is key to understand what has happened after that former Catalan President, Artur Mas, whom as a captain of a ship that was about to start a long and uncertain voyage, would pronounce in 2012 the words: “We have put route to Ithaca”, as a clear allusion to Homer's epic poem and the hard-shifts that the Catalans would have to face for independence, an independence which still seems hidden behind the horizon and where no one seems capable to tell if even the prow is pointing in the right direction.
Size: 4000px × 6000px
Location: Riudaura
Photo credit: © Xabier Mikel Laburu / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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