SPAIN Have you ever been part of a human pyramid at a picnic or team-building event? If your friends were ambitious, you might have had four layers, maximum, and everyone on the bottom row complained about people stepping on them while the rest of the group tried to maintain their balance just long enough to snap a photo.
Now imagine that multiplied by 1,000 and you get the human tower competitions that happen every fall in Spain.
The tradition of building human towers, or castells, is an old one, dating back to 1712. Teams compete to build super tall, complicated towers of people with the record set earlier this year at 10-levels high.
This video shows several of the towers from 2013's Human Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain. It's fascinating to watch as the towers get taller and taller, then occasionally collapse in on themselves.
The final piece of the tower is completed when a small child, usually a girl around 5 years old, climbs to the top and raises one hand with four fingers to symbolize the stripes of the Catalan flag.
The teams then have to deconstruct the tower without anyone falling. As the video shows, this doesn't always work out perfectly, but the feat is incredibly impressive anyway.
I would be terrified to be on any level of that tower, but I'm in awe at the participants' balance and strength. I probably wouldn't try this at home, but maybe we should all book tickets next year to the city of human towers.
Now imagine that multiplied by 1,000 and you get the human tower competitions that happen every fall in Spain.
The tradition of building human towers, or castells, is an old one, dating back to 1712. Teams compete to build super tall, complicated towers of people with the record set earlier this year at 10-levels high.
This video shows several of the towers from 2013's Human Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain. It's fascinating to watch as the towers get taller and taller, then occasionally collapse in on themselves.
The final piece of the tower is completed when a small child, usually a girl around 5 years old, climbs to the top and raises one hand with four fingers to symbolize the stripes of the Catalan flag.
The teams then have to deconstruct the tower without anyone falling. As the video shows, this doesn't always work out perfectly, but the feat is incredibly impressive anyway.
I would be terrified to be on any level of that tower, but I'm in awe at the participants' balance and strength. I probably wouldn't try this at home, but maybe we should all book tickets next year to the city of human towers.
