Calçots look like a huge spring onion or a small leek, raised using a technique developed by a farmer called Xat de Benaiges in the Valls area about a hundred years ago. Onions are grown from seed, replanted and allowed to grow into tall straight sprouts rather than encouraged to form a fat bulb. The shoots are gradually earthed up as they grow, to keep the stem pale and tender. The resulting vegetable is available throughout Spain, but particularly in Catalonia, between November and April.
Calçots appear on the menus of even the most dignified restaurants as a starter, but the popular tradition in its homeland is to eat them at a 'Calçotada', where mountains of calçots are griddled over wood fires, served in heaps (sometimes piled up on curved roof tiles) with grilled meat and sausages, and washed down with plentiful quantities of local wine. The freshly cooked calçots are black on the outside, but when the outer leaves are stripped away the inside is pale, mild and sweet. Dipped in a little of the traditional Romesco sauce the floppy spears can really only be eaten by holding them up high and muching from below. It's a fairly messy business, peeling ash blackened calçots by hand, dangling them into your mouth and drinking red wine from a shared 'porron', so bibs are also an important part of the tradition.
The 'Gran Fiesta De La Calçotada' in Valls seems to be struggling a little to decide what it wants to be in the twenty first century. The local tourist board publishes a multi-lingual website as if they want to encourage outsiders to visit, but the town is very poorly geared up for tourism. We made a brief visit last December to reconnoitre, but found the tourist office shuttered with no indication of when or if it ever opened. We walked around town for a couple of hours without finding a single hotel or guest house. The nearest camp site is twenty kilometres away. By chance we found a free paper which listed Valls' two hotels, but didn't give any indication of where they were or give phone numbers. I got the feeling that the Valls people were thinking 'But everyone knows where the hotels are!”, “Everyone knows when the Calçotada is, it's the Calçotada!”, not really used to having visitors.
In addition to that, Valls is in the Catalan heartland, and Calçots are one of their most treasured national traditions. Life in Valls seems to be lived entirely in Catalan, and we met a few people who seemed a bit unhappy to have to speak Castillian to us. Some of them may fear (as I do) that too many foreign visitors will dilute the Catalan nature of the celebration. On the other hand, the Catalan language and culture seems to be in very good health (particularly compared to Welsh), so I don't think they need feel too insecure.
We arrived the day before the event and checked into the Hotel Class, on the industrial estate about a half hour's walk north of town. It's a modern business hotel with anonymous characterless furnishings, but after months on the road it seemed like the height of luxury. With the help of the English speaking reception staff we finally got hold of a map of the town and a timetable of Calçotada events.
The heart of the festival is the calçots, their sauce, associated competitions and a parade, but these are accompanied by lots of other less relevant but fun events. Last year they combined it with a dog show, this year a display of vintage cars.
On the day of the festival the first things we visited were the craft market and the artisan food market, where stalls laden with cheeses, cured meat, salt cod, cakes, bread and sweets were lined up along a shady street down which an icy wind whistled. Valls is a long way south, but it's also a long way up. It's not a place to go for winter sun. I learned my first phrase of Catalan - “Molt fred!”.
Walking back into Pati Square we finally found the tourist office open, now we no longer needed it, and bought red tickets for the calçotada lunch in Plaça del Oli. Things were beginning to get busy now, so we headed to Plaça De l'Oli to see the demonstration of calçot cooking. Sand had been spread on the square and wood fires lit on it. A big (almost bed sized) metal grille was standing over one of the fires, piled high with calçots, smoke pouring off it and rising in a dense column up the face of the tall buildings lining the square. Men in espadrilles and floppy red and black Catalan caps were tending the fires and the calçots, occasionally picking up the grille with metal hooks and turning it around. A group of women at a table, also in costume, were working their way through a mountain of calçots, trimming the roots and green leaves off them ready for cooking.
The cooking area was fenced off with a picket fence, but wasn't much respected. A film crew were interviewing one of the cooks, people were climbing all over the area for photos, including a deaf party who ended up having a blazing silent argument in sign language.
We seemed to have got the idea of how to cook calçots, it's not too subtle apart from the outfit, so we hurried back to Pati where they were due to dance the sardana.
A small band of teenagers were lined up on chairs; flutes, oboes, double bass and drums, and a group of elderly people in matching blue fleeces were milling about. The band struck up a stately, slightly comical, tune, the blue fleeces joined hands in a circle and solemnly started making intricate steps. After a while there was a change in tempo and they all bobbed up and down in unison, then another change and they all raised their hands. Apart from that, there was little movement; no revolving and no 'hokey-kokey' in and out.
We noticed some spectators starting to join in the steps, then going and touching the hands of two of the dancers who opened the circle and let them in. As the circle got too big for the space, another circle started nearby, where people would drop their coats in a heap in the centre and then join the dance. A strange sight, hard to see the appeal but clearly they were enjoying it and danced for a long time.
The timetable was all in Catalan, so bits were hard to understand, but we could see that something was happening at mid day in Passeig dels Caputxins. We found the street crowded with people, bands and painted giant figures; a grotesque anthropomorphic calçot giant, a very regal king and queen, a giant horse, small fierce warriors, a giant calçot farmer and his giant wife with a pestle and mortar making sauce. As we walked around a trailer turned up with a model of a giant turkey. Horse drawn carriages were lined up on the roadside and there was happy bustling chaos.
We went looking for a space where we could station ourselves to watch the parade go by. The streets were crowded, with sunny corners being particularly popular. At last the parade arrived, in a very informal array. A crowd of tiny dancing children in costume was followed by a mass of parents in warm coats, half of them pushing pushchairs. Several Catalan pipe bands were interspersed amongst all the various giants and monsters. A throbbing samba band was accompanied by a whirling monster and a long dancing dragon.
The small warriors and big headed characters (the 'Nans' - dwarves) were worn by children (confusingly 'Nens'). It was very strange to see the characters, such as an elegant woman, a dignified old man or a fierce warrior, squabbling and pushing each other, or feeding crisps in through the mouth of the paper-maché head.
The big models were accompanied by supporters, some of whom carried pieces of pipe or trestles. On the move they'd guide the giant or keep the spectators back. When the parade stopped they'd put the pipe into sockets under the giant to make legs, or use the trestles to support it so the crew could swap over. Despite the cold weather there were some very hot looking people around!
It was time now to head back to Plaça el Pati for the calçot eating competition. The square was packed with people and activity – the sardana dancers couldn't be stopped, the winning sauce maker was being interviewed for TV, wine tastings and sauce making were still going on. The calçot eaters were lined up on the stage with a crowd of supervisors behind them, each separated from his or her neighbour by a metal partition. Each had a heap of calçots, a porron of wine and a pot of sauce.
A rocket soared over the crowd with a bang and off they went; stripping off the burned outer leaves, dipping the soft pale interior into the sauce and necking it like cormorants. Some were taking the competition seriously, quickly and methodically working their way through the calçots, others seemed more excited to be able to show off on stage. We watched for a while, not wanting to see the full 45 minutes as it wasn't that interesting and it seemed someone was bound to spew. Last year's winner managed over 355 calçots!
Suddenly there was a kerfuffle in the crowd as someone shoved past Stella, whirled around to take a photo and someone else behind us shouted “Mira!”. We looked behind us to see two casteller human towers had sprouted in the middle of the crowd; trembling grimacing burly men at the bottom, working up perhaps five layers to a small child at the top, plus a gang of suppporters holding the base steady. No sooner had we seen it and grabbed a photo than the top casteller scrambled down and the tower telescoped down back into the crowd.
We later read that Valls is where the 200 year old Casteller tradition started, and has now spread throughout Catalonia. We saw a poster in the streets advertising the fact that “All the world builds castles at Valls”. Not strictly true, but if you are a casteller I'm sure Valls is a place you'd want to go.
By now we were late for our own calçotada. We hurried to Placa de l'Oli where we joined a huge queue which ran out of the square, through an alley and up a side street.
We heard distant sounds of music, and the parade arrived, squeezing up our little street. The giants' attendants tried to move people back against the walls of the alley, but there really wasn't much space. A little way past us there was heavy duty scaffolding across the street, and they had to lay the giants down, carry them through and then stand them up again.
When the horse drawn carts arrived it got a bit dodgy. Some of the horses refused to go slowly, perhaps because the street was a bit slippery and a little bit uphill. The carriage drivers shouted for people to get out of the way, but spectators came close to getting crushed. One carriage went past with its brakes on, wheels locked skidding on the paving slabs inches from the feet of people who were pressed up against the walls.
A north African looking couple appeared at an upstairs window to watch the parade. Wonder what they made of it.
At last we got to the head of the queue in the square, where an exhausted team were frantically packing carrier bags and swapping them for the dinner tickets; a bundle of warm calçots in foil, bag of toasted hazel nuts, an orange, a piece of bread, a small bottle of wine from the Valls co-op, a bib and a pot of Romesco sauce. Finally found out what “Hi haurà graelles preparades per a les persones que vulguin coure carn, llonganissa, botifarra de Valls...” meant. A grille had been set up over a fire in the square and people were cooking their own sausages on it. A nearby butcher was selling sausage as fast as he could wrap it.
We headed off to find a space to eat. The streets were strewn with people eating from bags on doorsteps and corners. We found a space at a trestle table. The outside of the calçots was carbonised, which made it very messy to eat, but mild and sweet inside.
In response to Tony's comment, here are a couple of action photos:
With that, the party was more or less over; the crowds were thinning out, stallholders were packing up and the squares were strewn with blackened calçot leaves and crumpled wrappers. Practicalities:
The festival is usually held on the last Sunday of January (the 2011 event was brought forward due to a clash with another festival). The next one will be 29th January 2012..
The event didn't really get under way until after 10am and was over by 4pm, so local hotels and accommodation weren't really critical after all. It would be an easy day trip from Barcelona or Tarragona.
Valls has a railway station, but the connections were a bit tricky for us. Buses run between Valls and Tarragona coach station every half hour and take about half an hour. On the way most of them also stop at 'Camp de Tarragona', the railway station that serves the new high speed line. There are also regular buses to and from Barcelona and Reus.
There are two hotels in Valls. They appear to take bookings a year in advance for the festival.
Casa Felix is the older one, a couple of miles out of town on a busy dark road with no pavements. I wouldn't want to walk it. Casa Felix, Ctr de Tarragona KM 17, 43800, Valls. Tel +34 977 609090
www.felixhotel.net
We stayed at Hotel Class, which is on the northern outskirts surrounded by supermarkets and factories, but only half an hour's walk (on pavements) from the town centre. More expensive than Casa Felix, but modern, well located and unlike Casa Felix it had a room available.
Hotel Class, Pg President Taradellas, Ctra N-240, 43800 Valls. Tel +34 977 608090
www.hotelclassvalls.com
The nearest camp site is Camping Montblanc Park, Ctra Prenafeta KM 1.8, 43400, Montblanc (Tarragona). Tel +33 977 862544. If you stay there someone will have to stay sober enough to drive you back.
www.montblancpark.com
Tourist Information is in Plaça El Pati. Tel +34 977 612530. Good luck getting an answer though!
Almost every restaurant in town offers Calçotadas throughout the season, and certainly on festival week. Eating at one of these would be a little more expensive but a lot more comfortable than eating from a plastic bag in the street. Both hotels offered Calçotadas, and Casa Felix in particular seems to expect you to include that with your stay.
Calçots are available in season at greengrocers throughout Catalonia and wherever Catalans are feeling homesick. We took some back to Calpe and cooked them on a disposable barbecue, but they're not the same if they're not cooked on a properly blazing fire.
The sardana sounds like my kind of dance! Was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a photo of the pair of you in your bibs with a mixture of calçot juice, Romesco sauce and red wine over your faces (I'm sure you must have one - not that its a fetish of mine, you understand...).
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