Castellers de Vilafranca Win 2012 Human Tower Competition in Tarragona

Saturday and Sunday October 6-7, the bi-annual human tower competiton Concurs de Castells took place at Tarraco Arena Plaça in Tarragona, Catalonia. I will not be able to do full justice to the Sunday competition, since I could not go to the top fight this time. At the same time I want to comment on some of the many strong emotions I lived during the Saturday, when I was there with Bordegassos de Vilanova and feel that I cannot do so without first mentioning the overall winners. So here we go:

For the sixth time in a row, Castellers de Vilafranca from our neighbour town Vilafranca del Penedès won Concurs de Castells, this time with 15.197 points and after having built four constructions of the most difficult category, gamma extra: 4d9fa (c), 3d9fa (c), 2d8net and 4d9net. Only the latter three resulted in points (since only the best three castells count) and of these the last one caused the biggest celebration since it has never been completed by the green team before and, as I understand it, has not been completed by any team in the modern era of Catalan human towers.



In a shared second place we surprisingly saw Colla dels Joves Xiquets de Valls equaling the score of Colla Vella dels Xiquets de Valls. The two teams from Valls – the birthplace of the casteller culture – both reached 7.284 points with the same human towers, albeit not in the same order: 3d9f plus the two gamma extra constructions 9d8 and 5d9f.

In the fourth place with 5,178 points we found Colla Jove dels Castellers de Tarragona which completed 4d9f, 3d9f and one gamma extra construction, 9d8. The fifth place went to Capgrossos de Mataró who reached 4.913 points by completing 4d9f, 3d9f and crowned (but did not complete) the gamma extra construction 2d9fm.

To round off, I would like to highlight that the total score for Castellers de Vilafranca this time was the highest ever achieved in this competition and more than doubled those of the teams in the second place. On top of this, each and every one of the four green constructions was worth more points than the most advanced human tower performed by any other team on this day. That illustrates how completely this team dominates the world of Catalan human towers!



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Sources:
CastellersDeVilafranca.cat
ConcursDeCastells.cat
WebCasteller.com

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British Mail Online wrote an article about Concurs de Castells where they used one of my videos of Bordegassos de Vilanova for a close up picture.