The National Day of Catalonia: The Independence Day that isn’t

The signing of the Declaration of Independence. The storming of the Bastille. The Easter Rising of 1916. The fall of Barcelona. All of these days are celebrated as national days commemorating a political break from an oppressive regime. However, one of these things is not like the other.

You guess it. It’s Barcelona. You see, the people here celebrate their independence from Spain by commemorating the last battle against the Spaniards in a war over 300 years ago. A battle that, you might’ve guessed, they lost horribly.

Wait, what?

Ok, lets take it back about, I don’t know, a thousand years. It’ll make sense after a minute, so bear with me.

You see, way back in the 1100’s or so the noble family ruling Catalonia married into another noble family that was ruling the neighboring kingdom, making a unified little country in the north of Spain. That kingdom was called Aragon. You know, like the Catherine (Henry VIII’s wife) and Ferdinand (of Isabella and Columbus fame) Aragon. Come on people, 7th grade history. After a couple hundred years, the Aragon crown got really powerful, married into the last big kingdom (Castille) on the peninsula, took over the country and bam, Ferdinand and Isabella getting shit done.

Ok, so Ferdinand is really powerful, so he says to his cousins over in Barcelona “Hey guys, don’t worry, you’re still your own country, and you don’t have to really do what the rest of the country does. We’re family, so it’s cool.”

Barcelona got on board with that and everything as pretty cool for a while; until it wasn’t. After awhile, like with all families, there were some falling-outs. I imagine that Barcelona was invited to a barbeque and didn’t bring anything to share, which pissed off Madrid. You know things like that.

Come on Catalan. You had one job: bring the grill.

Eventually there was a succession crisis in the Spanish monarchy, which gave Barcelona the opportunity to say “Peace out Madrid. It’s been fun but I guess we’re not really related anymore, so we’re going to do our own thing.”

To which Madrid said, “Oh hell no.” and sent thousands of troops to tell the Catalans who was boss.

We will fight Spain with farm tools! What can go wrong?

This went on for a few decades until finally all of Barcelona’s foreign friends got annoyed and went home. France and Britain just kinda decided it wasn’t worth it, which allowed Spain to march right up to the Barcelona city and lay down the law.

Which leads us to the Catalan National Day. So on September 11^th 1714, about 300 guys from Barcelona got together and said “Nope, not gonna do it. Not gonna let them Spaniards in.” Well that worked out about as well as you’d think, and they all died in the town square.

But hey look! We got a wicked awesome billboard now!

So that’s fun.

Now here we are, 300 years later, and the folks here in Barcelona use it as an opportunity to remind Spain that they aren’t apart of the country. Even though they are. And even though it was their ruling aristocratic family that actually created modern Spain. But lets not talk about that.

How do they celebrate this odd not-so-independence day? Well, it’ wouldn’t be a party without starting with some good old flag waving.

Calm down old guy. The kid is a much cuter mascot.