Barcelona Begins Massive La Merce Festival
Anyone taking cheap flights to Barcelona over the next few days will have an opportunity to experience one of the city's most venerable festivals – La Merce.
The festival starts today and has been a fixture on Barcelona's fiesta calendar since 1902, and is considered one of the region's most traditionally Catalonian events. Paying truibute to the city's patron saint, Mare de Deu de la Merce, the festival marks the end of summer and welcomes the cooler autumn days and nights with a cavalcade of concerts, street parades, open-air dance and theatre performances and spectacular fireworks displays.
Anyone taking Barcelona holidays over this period is strongly advised not to miss La Merce's premier event – the Correfoc or "Fire Run". During this event, the streets are lined with excited onlookers as a breathtaking son et lumière show takes place featuring participants dressed as devils and dragons.
Some 80,000 fireworks are also let off during the Fire Run and people are very free and easy with sparklers, bangers and hand-held fireworks. As a result though, the Correfoc is a very, very noisy affair, so earplugs are strongly recommended for those who dislike loud bangs!
The La Merce Festival takes place at locations around the centre of Barcelona until Sunday 25 September. Cheap flights to Barcelona are available from a multitude of providers, including cheap fares specialists such as Jet2.com, which operates services to the city from Glasgow, Leeds Bradford and Manchester.
Passengers travelling from London and the south east can take cheap flights to Barcelona with easyJet, Ryanair, British Airways and KLM, among others.
Holidays News posted by 
on 22 September 2011
cheap flights, cheap flights to Barcelona, Barcelona holidays
http://www.jet2.com/News/Make_Time_for_September%E2%80%99s_La_Merce_Festival/
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