IT'S A CORKER

The little city of Girona, about an hour’s drive north of Barcelona is a perfectly pleasant place, with a quaint old town, a church or two, with some eccentric little shops, (one proudly displaying Marmite for sale) a reasonably grand placa with a few decent restaurants and a goodly variety of bohemian tourist tat. 

It is also home to a quite a few nouveau-hippy types: squeaky clean dreadlocks, supercilious attitude and lots of expensive gadgets called “I”-something. 

Girona is for most of year worth seeing but not worth going to see (to paraphrase Samuel Johnson).  

However around the third week of May every year, the world, or at least a decent chuck of it, beats a path to Girona for the annual Temps de Flors (Time of Flowers) festival. 

 It is not quite as extravagant or as all-embracing as the other local festivals. Rather than blanketing the place in blooms and throwing grand petal laden parades the Temps de Flors is focused around a promenade of eclectic displays some prominent in the middle of public spaces, others tucked away in theatre lobbies, stairwells, shops, courtyards, workshops and churches. 

They range from the childish (because they are made by children), through obscure and the remarkable to the outright absurd. 

 

All in all, very Catalan.