Castellers are Totally Badass

Proof of my nerd cred: among my occasional pastimes is picking an image from the “Images for Cleanup” category at Wikimedia Commons and, you guessed it, cleaning it up. (If you’re curious, here’s an example of my handiwork.)»

Nerdiness sometimes brings unexpected little rewards: last night I came across an image at the Commons that only needed to be categorized. The photo that caught my eye showed something like an enormous game of Jenga… an enormous game of Jenga, made of people. Pardon my internet shorthand, but OMFG!

It turned out that I had found a photo of the Castellers de Vilafranca. Castells, I learned, are human towers, the building of which is a traditional Catalan sporting activity. I also learned that it is fucking insane — and I mean that admiringly.

Check this out: here are the Castellers de Vilafranca on August 31, 2009, attempting history’s first tres de nou amb folre i agulla — roughly translated, a nine-level tower with two base levels, three people each on the upper levels, and an agulla (“needle”) of one person per level inside the main tower. If you can’t understand the commentator’s Catalonian-accented Spanish,(oops...)» If you can’t understand a word the Catalan-language commentator is saying, don’t worry — just his tone of voice pretty much says it all.

The castell is complete when the kid at the very top (in this case, the top of the agulla) raises one hand with four fingers extended, a salute which symbolically indicates the stripes on the Catalan flag. After that, as you no doubt noticed, comes the somewhat important task of everybody in the tower getting down.

For the Castellers de Vilafranca to pull off the first tres de nou amb folre i agulla would be one thing, but in the video they achieve the first one descarregat, i.e., built to completion and successfully deconstructed. That’s why everyone goes so apeshit celebrating at the end. While the ultimate goal of a castell is for it to be descarregat, this is by no means a given. Castelleres also list as achievements towers that were carregat, meaning they were built to completion but collapsed during dismantling.

That’s right — castells fall, it happens all the time. Not as inevitably as in Jenga, but it does. Here’s what it looks like. The people on the base level(s) keep their arms up and cushion the fall of the people from the higher levels. Serious injuries are said to be uncommon, and fatalities rare. Statistically, I imagine castells are safer than running with the bulls… be that as it may, don’t try it at home with your friends.

For more about castells, the Wikipedia article is decent in its current form, for which I’ll take a small amount of credit. The Castellers de Vilafranca have a handsome web site (just be aware that the link at the top that says “English” leads back to Wikipedia). Also, like any savvy modern organization worth its salt, they’re on Facebook. Hey, I’ll say this much: it makes a lot more sense to become a Facebook fan of the Castellers de Vilafranca than it does to become a fan of “I bet I can find 1 million people who love ketchup.”

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