Sant Jordi, the most beautiful day of the year

Avui és el dia més bonic de l’any a Barcelona.

Today is the most beautiful day of the year in Barcelona.

It’s Sant Jordi (Saint George), the Day of the Book and the Rose. It may be World Book Day as well, partly named that by UNESCO due to Sant Jordi traditions in Barcelona, but no place celebrates books the way Barcelona does. Which, as someone who built forts on my bunk bed as a kid so I could hide from my parents that I was reading past bedtime, is a marvelous thing.

All of Passeig de Gracia (think a mile-long stretch of Fifth Avenue in NYC) is shut down for the day for bookstands, and bookstands also fill much of Las Ramblas with numerous other posts around the city. Sant Jordi is the most celebrated cultural day in Catalonia. The tradition is to give a book and a rose to a loved one, usually a romantic love interest. It is held on April 23^rd because that is the day St. George (Jordi in Catalan) was martyred by Roman emperor Diocletian for refusing to persecute Christians. Over time, legends arose that Sant Jordi had defeated a dragon that threatened a princess, and a rosebush grew where the dragon was killed. Sant Jordi has been the patron saint of Barcelona since 1456. That same century, Barcelona was holding a Sant Jordi rose fair. Nearly a century ago, in 1927, to promote book sales, they launched a book fair, and its popularity led the region to move it to April 23^rd for Sant Jordi, and also because both Cervantes and Shakespeare died on that day.

Spain in general has great love for books, with la Feria del Libro in Madrid quite famous and other book fairs in Valencia, Sevilla, Córdoba and all over the country. Still, for me, the celebration of Sant Jordi is something apart.

At stands representing different bookstores, publishers or collectives, people line up as if to meet a rock star in order to get a book signed by a favorite author. In 2024, nearly two million books were sold on Sant Jordi, more than the population of the city of Barcelona.

Something that also strikes me as an American living in Barcelona while my home country careens through competitive authoritarianism on towards a full-on dictatorship – so many books featured reflect on la Guerra Civil (the Spanish Civil War), which ended with fascism in Spain for four decades; World War II and other historic or contemporary writings on democracy, fascism, communism and battles among different sorts of government. Within Spain, perhaps only Basque Country suffered as much as Catalonia under Franco’s dictatorship. Catalans know from dictatorship and democracy, so books on these subjects and by authors such as Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky or the post-WWII Milton Mayer book on Germans in the Nazi period “They Thought They Were Free” surface again and again.

Reading and knowing history won’t solve world problems. But failing to know history is a good way to repeat it, and not the parts one would want to repeat.

Barcelona in 2025 is a beacon of knowledge, democracy, innovation, scientific advancement and freedom. It’s that every day, but especially on Sant Jordi.

The most beautiful day of the year.