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Published: August 22nd 2016
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Have just spent the weekend in Girona – a very beautiful medieval town. However, I am writing about last weekend because it was such a great weekend. I was invited to go to Siurana with the family for the weekend. They explained that a small traditional festival would be happening. As we were driving up the steep and winding mountain roads, they pointed out that there on top of this huge rock was the town of Siurana.
About the village:
Siurana is a small fairy tale village perched on a rock surrounded by the Prades mountains and water. There are only 20 people who live there all year round. Siurana is well known for its rock climbing, it has the second tallest climbing cliff in the world I’m told! Siurana is a very small village, it has one shop, 2 restaurants, a café/bar and then some houses, most of which are only used during the holiday period. It is a very popular place to visit, many tourists come for the day from the nearby seaside area of Salou. The village was built by Islamic people in around the 11
th century to hide for centuries, however
it was later conquered by Christians. There is a myth that the leader of the Islamic tribe jumped off the cliffs with her horse. Therefore, there is a memorial in her place on the cliffs.
The festival:
Every village throughout Spain holds a festival for their saint. I’m not sure how the weekend is actually chosen but that is why they have these festivals. All the village was decorated for the festival, many houses entered a competition for the best decorated house!! The balloon decorated house one was my favourite, followed closely by the sweet and chocolate house.
Day 1:
On arrival we met all the family. The family I’m staying with have family who live in Siurana. They own a very large house which was actually built by a Nazi. The Nazi had tried to escape and decided that it would be impossible to be found there, because at the time there was not a paved road to the village. I’m not what money the house was therefore paid with……But anyway this house is very beautiful and looks all over the spectacular surroundings. One of the festival
activities that evening was for the children – the activity involved being connected to a rope. The aim of the game was to see how many boxes one could stack before falling off. After this the children then had a disco and food. Which left me to explore the picturesque surroundings and watch the sunset.
The man of the family or should I just say A’s brother owns a restaurant in the village, which is doing really well. So that night he invited us to eat there, of course I didn’t get to select my meal but they told me it would be traditional cuisine! Snails……Of course these were not like the French snails but in Catalonia they are cooked in salt and then you dip them in to aioli. I also tried some lovely red wine. Siurana is known for very good wine due to it’s local vine yards.
After we went to find our camping spot. Now the family have a motor home and when we go away I stay in a tent by myself which is fine. However, we rocked up to a place in the middle of nowhere – there
was nothing. No lights, no people, no other tents!! It was 1am pitch black and they said so is this ok for you to camp here? I panicked? Really? No I’m going to get attacked by wild animals, strange people, blown away – I can’t camp here. So after 10 minutes of driving around to even more dark places I decided to follow the quote’ every day you have to do something that scares you!’ The family assured me it was an extremely safe area and laughed at the fact I was scared, especially after travelling Thailand alone and walking dark streets of London. So I set up my tent and the man of the family gave me his fireman pen knife incase of any emergencies….I have to say I slept quite well, there were not any animals or strange people so now I have ticked off something new! I’ve camped on my own in the wilderness of some place I did not really know!!
Day 2:
The next morning, I took the opportunity to take a walk around the area. As you can see from the photos it is very picturesque. We had
lunch at A’s families house. As I’ve said before in Catalonia they take a lot of time to prepare the meals, they all sit with their family when they can and lunch can last from 1 hour -3 hours! For lunch we ate…rabbit and snails in a sort of casserole! Another typical Catalonian meal for the area. We also drunk a lot of red wine followed by a sweet wine for dessert! I liked this family a lot!
That evening the area put on a village dinner. The cooks began cooking around 3 hours before and made a dish called Fideua which is short pasta with seafood and garlic it was delicious!! We all sat down at long tables, ate and sang songs. Apparently the meal comes from the fishermen and what they used to make, so it is common to sing songs related to the sea. Also it is a typical thing for everyone to wear a hat to the festival, unfortunately I did not know this, But people did turn up with all kind of hats. After the meal we had a hot rum drink, ‘rum cremat’ – it is rum with cinnamon that is
then put near a flame apparently to take out some of the alcohol and leave the flavour. However, the alcohol content was still pretty strong. This is a typical drink of Catalonia and A assured me it would help me to sleep in the wilderness that night.
Day 3:
My favourite thing about day 3 has to be the water fight! At around 1pm I started to see all these water guns being put out in boxes. I then found out that the village would have a water fight, I had to join in. However the lady in charge would not allow me to have a water gun because I did not have a band I was meant to have! So for the first 10 minutes I sat there getting wet till she realised I was well getting quite wet and just said hey take the last 2 water guns! The tiny ones, which fit a trickle of water in and are used for like 2 year olds. Well as you can imagine I got soaked. The fight began with pistols and then turned in to buckets! I seemed to
be a target and had buckets thrown at me galore! But it was so so much fun.
Another event that day was the human pyramid. This is a Catalonian tradition whereby a local organisation build a tower of people. They do this to music. It was very entertaining and takes a lot of skill and practice to be able to complete this. As you can see in the video, this tower nearly fell down!!
To end the weekend I have come to the conclusion that Catalonians live on tomato bread. This is plain bread rubbed with tomato and olive oil drizzled on top. They eat it with everything, they don’t have butter over here. I have to say I do like it too – plain bread just won’t be the same anymore and I’m now a pro at making the tomato bread J.
I really really enjoyed my weekend in Siurana, it was such a beautiful place, amazing people to meet, a brilliant festival and really fortunate that the family invited me J.
Oh and to add Amelia is a saint’s name so from now on I have
a saints day! On this day you get sent messages of congratulations and presents just saying 😉!!
Adeu
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