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Creative Enterprises

  • Catifaires in Garriga bring color to the streets during the Corpus Christi celebrations.
    Catifaires in Garriga bring color to the streets during the Corpus Christi celebrations.
    Photo by Ramon Ferrandis

Catalans embrace cultural enterprise and creative freedom, using their strong traditional culture to fuel creativity and innovation.

Family-run businesses like butcher shops and vineyards pass family recipes from one generation to the next while also exploring new models of production. Collectives that market wine, olive oil, and rice bring local community producers together to share the costs of processing, packaging, distribution, and marketing. Many Catalan enterprises value traditional products, high-quality ingredients, and local producers.

Specialized companies produce steam-punk festival art installations—just one of many cutting-edge innovations in the performing arts. A wide variety of new festivals have emerged, like the Sonar festival, now a global phenomenon. Other companies create and distribute children’s games that teach highly cherished values like collaboration. Catalans are actively engaged in cultural enterprises that sustain—and transform—their traditional art forms.

Innovation has even come to the iconic human towers. In the 1990s, as human tower teams underwent a number of transitions, they began to allow women to help build the towers. They soon realized that they could build taller towers than ever before because the women generally weighed less than their male counterparts. Women now lead about ten of the one hundred teams, and they are credited with bringing a different leadership style to their teams.


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