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Anyone foolish enough to get themselves lost driving a Madrid-registered car during morning rush hour in Barcelona will quickly get a pretty good idea of the self-assertive prickliness of the capital city of Catalunya. That applies in spades if you arrive in the city on 24 September, the culmination of the great September celebration of the Festa de la Mercè. The Festa is a wild knees-up and assertion of regional identity, for which the citizens rehearse enthusiastically late into the night in the street bars of Barcelona.

Any self-respecting Catalunyan, and especially a Barcelonian, knows full well that it is historic and prosperous Barcelona rather than upstart Madrid that is Spain's premier city. The Barcelonians, delighted on this Day of Days to express their superiority over a feeble driver from the rival city, hooted furiously and shook their fists as I wobbled timidly along the crowded boulevards at 30 kph. Such was my introduction to the Festa de la Mercè. It was a great relief to pull out of the snarling traffic into a parking bay. I vowed not to touch the car again all week.

It was back in the 13th century that La Madonna de la Mercè, the Madonna of Largesse, appeared in a dream to local saint Pere Nolasc, bidding him to establish a religious order to succour Christians captured by Barbary pirates. In 1637 the Madonna saved Barcelona from a plague of locusts, and her status as patron saint of the city was assured for ever more.

The festival in her honour was a tame affair until a few years ago. Under General Franco's regime it was limited to a couple of pallid processions. After the old dictator's death in 1975 (ending 35 years of repression of the language and customs of Catalunya) the Festa de la Mercè took off in a big way, a popular explosion of delight in new-found freedom.

Whatever was big, bright and Catalunyan - carnival giants, human towers, traditional music and dancing - was borrowed from the various local festivals of the region and hitched on to Barcelona's big day. Since then the festival has swollen into a huge multi-day affair, and has grown far away from its original religious and very localised roots. Not that the participants or spectators care. The Festa de la Mercè is not some synthetic revival dreamed up by the tourist board; it is a joyful, rowdy expression of Catalunyan, and especially Barcelonian, identity.

Barcelona is a great walking town. But not for the sake of fresh air, and certainly not for the solitude on Festa day. The fumes of the city stung harshly in my nose as I inched towards the Ramblas, one among twenty thousand making for Barcelona's famous promenade. At the top of the Ramblas I pressed a brass tap and took a drink from the fountain of Les Canalettes. Strangers who do this, legend says, are sure to return to Barcelona. Then I sauntered along the thoroughfare, nibbling a pastry bought from a street vendor and listening to the sweet singing of finches, sad captives from the countryside hung up in little wicker cages to give passers-by a frisson of rurality.

In the cool vaulted hall of the Palau de la Virreina, athletic young men and women were inserting themselves into the papier mâchè bodies of mythical beasts and monsters. Giants loomed 15 feet tall, experimentally spinning round with a swirl of skirts. Their attendants were getting ready, too, winding themselves into ten-foot sashes, nervously puffing at cigarettes, checking their costumes. Half an hour to the off, and the pre-parade jitters were well under way.

I left the paraders to their nail-chewing and fag-puffing, and went off to shuffle with the crowds through the narrow medieval streets of the Ciutat Vella, the old city of Barcelona. Everyone moved at snail's pace. I got my elbow in someone's ribs, and someone else got theirs in mine. But eventually we all squeezed out beside the basilica in the jam-packed Plaça de la Mercè.

The crowd seethed murmurously as a human tower of young men standing on each others' shoulders began to build itself in front of the basilica's open door. 'You have never seen this before?' enquired the man whose heels were digging into my toes. 'This is speciality of Catalunya. Nine peoples high is the highest tower that has been made. But maybe 10 peoples high today, eh?'

This human tower was never going to be a record-breaker. At five peoples high it was already quivering like a multi-storey wedding cake made of jelly. A young boy shinned up the outside of the tower like a monkey. At the summit he pointed dramatically towards the basilica door. Out came the Mayor of Barcelona. 'Ladies and gentleman, I declare this Festa well and truly open,' was the gist of his flowery speech in good broad Catalan. Clapping and cheering echoed round the square. Now things could get going.

Els Gegants del Pi
Ara ballen, ara ballen;
Els Gegants del Pi
Ara ballen pel cami.

'The Giants of the Pine,
Now they dance, now they dance,
The Giants of the Pine,
Now they dance on the road.'

So sang the children. The successor of the original Pine grows outside the church of Santa Maria del Pi. In the square, middle-aged men and women had piled their handbags and shopping baskets and were circling round them in the sardana, the gentle Catalan national dance. Rough-edged music came from the gralla, a wind instrument with the hoarse tone of a bagpipe chanter.

There were grallas aplenty in the Plaça St Jaume, where another sardine-squashed crowd roared and gasped as more human towers arose: human castles, in fact, buttressed round the base with a dozen stalwarts. Young men in white shirts and red sashes grasped each other round the shoulders to form a ring fifteen feet across. Others climbed vigorously on their shoulders to make the next storey. More castle-builders swarmed upwards on the backs and knees of their supporting colleagues, until the structures swayed 30 or 40 feet in the air. From the top of the tallest - eight peoples high, this one - a little girl swarmed up a rope and in among the dignitaries on the balcony of the City Hall, to the huge delight of the crowd.

Time for a breather. I nibbled tapas of monkfish and pickled peppers at the zinc counter of a bar, and drifted on: first down to the revamped waterfront where futuristic music harried the multitudes across walkways over the water, then sideways out of the crowd stream into the cool, shaded stone box of the Plaça Sant Felip Neri. Under the acacia trees, pungent smoke drifted from the lumpy roll-up of a dreadlocked hopeless artist. Water splashed soporifically in a fountain. This was relaxation made manifest.

In the cool of the evening I made my way back to the Ramblas, and took up station among the buzzing crowds for the Giants' Parade. Thunderflash explosions from the direction of Plaça de Catalunya heralded the appearance of the grotesques.

First came the scarlet-jacketed Urban Guards, mounted on horses and blaring on brass instruments. Next it was the turn of the Beasts: a crowned eagle, a donkey, a garland-munching lion, a dragon covered in red and yellow streamers. Then the Giants hove in view - twirling, prancing, sinister and captivating. Gralla and drum blazed out as they bore down on us, a pageant of the city's history: 20-ft tall Saracens and knights-at-arms, fishermen and politicians, Roman centurions and buxom Catalan lasses.

Trainer-clad feet pranced and spun under the Giants' flowing coats and skirts. The Barcelonians scooped up armfuls of coloured streamers from the roadway and flung them at the swollen, impassively staring fibreglass faces. And I scooped and flung with the best of them, a Catalunyan by adoption for the evening, lost entirely in the spirit of the Festa de la Mercè:


Els Gegants de la Ciutat
Ara ballen, ara ballen;
Els Gegants de la Ciutat
Ara ballen pel terrat.

'The Giants of the City,
Now they dance, now they dance,
The Giants of the City,
Now they dance on the roof ... '

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