By Bailey Hosfelt
Follow former culture editor and current abroad correspondent Bailey Hosfelt as she sets up home base in España and bops about Europe for the semester, looking to save a buck and learn a thing or two along the way.
BARCELONA, SPAIN — Pyromaniacs in the States have some serious competition, and his name is Correfoc. Spanish for “fire run,” this open-air performance puts any inferno-based spectacle I’ve seen in my 20 years on this earth to shame.
Part of La Mercè – the annual Catalan celebration to honor Our Lady of Mercy (the city’s patron saint) held this past weekend – Correfoc is surely the most precarious of cultural events on the festival calendar.
Ten kilometers of parade routes snake through packed city streets as people dressed up as devils light fireworks strung on pitchforks and race past spectators, some of whom run right into the line of fire themselves and let the sparks cascade overhead. Engulfing the air in embers, the devils dance to the musical stylings of rhythmic drumming, picking up intensity and bringing in dragons and beasts to ignite along the way.
As someone who gets nervous around the basic sparkler, I was skeptical of just how safe I would feel at this event. After reassurance from a Barcelona native in my IPE class that I would be “just fine” so long as I covered my head, I decided I had nothing to lose. Well, maybe my hair. Or my eyebrows.
Coming down from a 102 degree fever, I put my hood up and embraced the blaze coming my way in the form of Barcelona residents dressed as Satan’s best hype men. The people playing devilish dress-up are part of “fire groups,” which is like a biker gang in my mind but even better.
The website for La Mercè describes Correfoc as “a moment as magical as it is adrenaline-pumped that might put you in touch with your more instinctive id.” I’m not sure if Freud had Correfoc in mind when creating his structural model of the human psyche, but horns out really does gets your heart beating.
So where does this slightly hazardous tradition come from anyway? Although Correfoc is a relatively new addition to the La Mercè lineup, gaining momentum throughout Catalunya in the 1980s and 90s, it gets its rich history from folklore.
The traditional Ball de Diables, or “Devil Dances,” were a fixture in medieval street theater where the age-old battle between good and evil took place with elaborate pyrotechnics added into the equation. The Church soon decided to get in on the fun and adopted the tradition, often in accordance with religious occasions such as feasts like Our Lady of Mercy.
Following the death of General Franco and the fall of the Spanish dictatorship, a cultural revival in Catalunya brought back past customs into public holidays, fire runs being one.
Equal parts frenzied and fun, Correfoc is a sight to see. The fact that the city allows such a high intensity event to take place within its streets is something I admire about my temporary home. Seeing parents sporting toddlers atop shoulders – taking in the spectacle from a responsible distance, of course – made me wonder why we often play it so safe.
The old saying warns that if you play with fire, you will get burned. But for those at Correfoc, experiencing a communal spark was more important.
