Valls, in the province of Tarragona, is the town where the Catalan culture to build human towers has its origin and thanks to a strong historic rivalry, this municipality of just about 25.000 inhabitants, regularly organizes one of the most traditional and interesting diades castelleres and this based only on local teams. The event is Santa Úsrula and it is the main annual challenge between Colla Vella dels Xiquets de Valls (Vella) and Colla dels Joves Xiquets de Valls (Jove).
For this year’s edition, held on October 23, Vella were the favourites and certainly lived up to it. From a technical point of view they were, by far, the best team and all of us who were there will remember their absolutely impressive 5de9f - a construction which Vella themselves had not completed (descarregat) since 2002 and which Castellers de Vilafranca – the otherwise best team in Catalonia –, have only crowned (carregat) so far this season. Apart from this, Vella completed 3de9f and 4de9f. Their attempt to build a 4de9 without a second support structure (net) unfortunately collapsed before being crowned.
Having said that, from a motivation point of view, I judge that it is Jove which have the most to celebrate now. Being considered one of the best teams of Catalonia becomes a burden when you do not “deliver as expected” and until today the team had not completed one single castell of nine levels in 2011. Today, on the other hand, they had the clàssica de nou within reach: after a strong start when they finally completed 4de9f they at least crowned 3de9f and rounded off with a solid 2de8f.
If you plan to go visit the Santa Úrsula day of human towers, you had better take note that plaça del Blat is a beautiful, but very small square and that most of the spectators therefore have to watch the exhibition from the narrow streets leading up to it.
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Read more in Catalan: Diari de Tarragona (N.B: The journalist was mistaken in writing that Jove completed a Pde8f. If they had done, that would have been on top of the ‘gamma extra’ construction Pde8fm).
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Regarding my YouTube videos, I ask you to forgive me for the very low quality this time. The combination of the light conditions and the use of zoom turned out to be really bad.
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