I have been lucky enough to attend a few Correfocs in Barcelona
Do you have any useless facts or stories about Correfoc
It's good to hear you could go, correfocs are very fun. I don't know how "tame" they are in Barcelona, since in Barcelona and sometimes other big cities these kinds of things often need to be more controlled. But in my town at least they're fun but also can be a bit scary if the devils chase you a lot hahaha.
Correfocs in the way we understand them now (inviting devil dances and dragons/bestiary from other towns, parading with the fire through the town interacting with the watchers, people joining in to dance under the fire, etc) is actually one of our most recent traditions, but it's so popular that nobody thinks it anymore. Obviously, they come from the devils' dance (ball de diables) that we've been doing for centuries, but historically they were done in a circle and not chasing the people watching, and the people watching didn't join the dance with the devils. That started happening since the late 1970s-early 1980s, when the fascist dictatorship of Spain ended (1978). After decades of prohibiting and persecuting many expressions of Catalan culture and imposing only the Spanish culture, suddenly after the dictator's death we found that we could celebrate our holidays again. People were so happy that the whole country got carried away and started celebrating many of the holidays that elderly people used to do as kids, even young people became so happy that they could participate in those things that they had always heard about at home but were forbidden or done secretly. There was a big revival for Catalan folk culture in the late 1970s and 1980s for this reason, and that's when they started inviting other towns' dancers and bestiary for the correfoc (the old way would be to just have the dancers and bestiary from that town) and people got carried away and joined in the dance under the fire. Since 1980, we see that every time more towns and cities are doing it like this, and by the 1990s it has become standard in most places. And we're glad they did!
