Behind the mind-boggling human carpentry of Catalonia’s castellers

With help from a casteller I’d met outside a bar the night before, I’d snagged a coveted balcony spot where I can lean out over an iron railing and the jostling crowd. In white pants and pink shirts is the oldest casteller team on earth—founded in 1791, Colla Vella is also the reigning area champion—while the upstarts on the century-old Colla Joves are decked in red.

And watching the preparations unfold from a perch atop their parents’ shoulders are the tiniest castellers, whose job is to climb to the very top of the towers, whose structure couldn’t support adult bodies. Small children have been important members of casteller teams since the earliest days of the Catalan tradition. “We wouldn’t have castells without children,” says Colla Vella member Unai Martínez, who joined the team aged 12. “They’re agile, they’re light, but above all, they’re brave. Adults couldn’t do what they do.”

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I found Martínez the day before the event, in a former school where Colla Vella had set up a temporary base camp. A tall, slender frame has helped earn him a place in the lower levels of the castell, and he towers above his 10-year-old teammate Sofia Aubareda, who has been a casteller since she was four.

With dark eyes and a steady gaze, Sofia wears a team jacket embroidered with a Colla Vella logo. “I’m an enxaneta,” she explains, “That means I have to climb to the top of the castell and raise my hand.” Until the enxaneta hoists a hand in the air, the castell is considered incomplete.

Sofia spends the time just before a tower goes up in a room set aside for the youngest team members, where they can play and color away from the noisy crowd. By the time they’re called to the tower, they’re ready. “They want to climb,” Martínez told me, “to the point where if you tell them they’re not climbing that day, they get angry.”

Going vertical requires a firm foundation built from dozens upon dozens of bodies pressed into a sweating, trembling scrum … By the time the tower is five levels high, it’s trembling and swaying and twitching like a tired muscle.

The kids might be happily tucked away with their coloring books, but the atmosphere on the square is decidedly more tense. All eyes are on the teams as a gralla wails a traditional tune; this double-reed instrument announces the beginning of the competition with the piercing, atonal urgency of a vuvuzela.

Equal parts flesh and architecture, the castellers’ craft is a kind of human carpentry, using their own muscle, sinew and bone as tools. And going vertical requires a firm foundation built from dozens upon dozens of bodies pressed into a sweating, trembling scrum. Below me, the red shirts of Colla Joves congeal into a tightly packed circle, with lowered heads and squared shoulders that serve as footholds for the first round of climbers.

As the second level is cemented into place, raised arms buttress the structure and more climbers set out from the base, hooking their bare toes into the waistbands of the human ladder. By the time the tower is five levels high, it’s trembling and swaying and twitching like a tired muscle.

The day before, I’d asked Sofia if she ever got scared. “I was a little nervous at the beginning, but not scared,” she told me. “But I don’t get so nervous anymore—unless it’s a really big castell.”

Unai, who’s just 21, insists that he’d invite his future children to join the team as soon as they were able; his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were on Colla Vella, and he likes the idea of passing on the tradition. Not everyone with actual kids seemed so cavalier.

Sofia’s mother objected at first, and I meet one couple with deep family ties to Colla Vella who have already decided that their infant daughter would not join the team as a young child—too stressful and scary for the parents, they say. And the helmets the kids wear? They’re a relatively new part of the uniform, introduced when a 12-year-old girl died in 2006 after falling from a human tower.

But after each fall, the teams dust off, carry injured members to the edge of the crowd and hunch together to plan the next try. The vivid red of Colle Joves’ uniforms grows darker with sweat, and smudgy footprints appear on the shoulders of Colle Vella’s pink shirts.

On the day I watch the castellers in Valls, the mood in the square grows dour as the towers keeps collapsing; a disappointing hometown performance that would be among the season’s final events. The afternoon is punctuated by castellers being whisked away on stretchers and the arrival of a medevac helicopter.

But after each fall, the teams dust off, carry injured members to the edge of the crowd and hunch together to plan the next try. The vivid red of Colle Joves’ uniforms grows darker with sweat, and smudgy footprints appear on the shoulders of Colle Vella’s pink shirts.

In the hours I’d spent poring over casteller footage on YouTube—something you should really do right this minute—I’d been staggered by the sheer architecture of it all, the improbable way that the castells transformed bodies into load-bearing beams.

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But in Valls, it was the trembling fragility of the towers that catches the breath in my throat, along with the sight of straining muscles and gritted teeth and falling kids. And until the gralla sounds at the end of the day, the towers keep going up, then down, then up—it’s no wonder that castellers have become a symbol of Catalan nationalism as some in the region struggle determinedly to separate from Spain.

Just 12 hours earlier, I’d been drinking beer from plastic cups in that same square while talking about castells, independence, and political protests with Colla Vella member Roger Montalà. Last June, he told me, the Valls castellers pooled their money to hire buses for an overnight trip to Madrid, where they stopped at the three prisons where Catalan leaders were being held by the national government, and climbed into five-layer castells outside the walls. “We came to give them hope,” said Montalà.

And on St Ursula’s day in Valls, the competition had begun with earnest chants for independence, democracy, and the release of political prisoners. The crowd passed a Catalan flag from hand to hand as they sang all the verses of Els Segadors, a brooding anthem that was a somber note in a day of challenging climbs.

While preparing for this trip, I spoke to my dad in the United States, who wondered aloud if castellers inspired the same magnetic disaster-watching that keeps all eyes on a NASCAR race, secretly hoping for a crash. Watching the muscles strain beneath the castellers’ white pants, however, the stakes looked terribly high and terribly human. No one seemed to be wishing for a fall.

But according to castellers, it’s not as bad as it looks. Everyone dispenses the same advice, though it strikes me as less than reassuring: “Just don’t ever look up, because then they fall on your face and break your neck.”

Wouldn’t a pile of humans landing on the back of your head be just as dangerous? “No,” I hear again and again. “Then it’s fine.”