Santa Eulàlia: light, gothic fish tanks and a beating paper heart in the centre of Barcelona

What do you get the city that has everything? Two of everything, of course. And that brings us onto Barcelona’s Santa Eulàlia.

While I’m not trying to claim that the Catalan capital has everything, exactly – some decently priced public swimming pools would be a start – the city can proudly boast two patron saints in Santa Eulàlia and Mare de Déu de la Mercè and therefore two annual festivals.

The first of these, the festival of Santa Eulàlia, took place last week although you’d be excused for not noticing it. Of the two events, La Mercè, which takes place around September 24, is by far he better known: it has a public holiday, for a start, and the festivities are widespread, taking in everything from filthy techno parties to a Catalan Wine Fair.

Pretty much everybody in Barcelona has taken part in La Mercè, in other words, while many Barcelona dwellers have never so much as glimpsed a cavallet during Santa Eulàlia.

You might assume, therefore, that Eulàlia is the latecomer among the two patron saints, bustling her way into the limelight as only a 13-year-old girl can (Santa Eulàlia was a 13-year-old Christian who was tortured by the Romans in various unspeakable ways  for refusing to recant her Christianity).

But you’d be wrong. In fact, Eulàlia was first, holding the title of Barcelona’s patron saint outright until 1687 (some reports say 1637), when Barcelona’s governing Consell de Cent asked for La Mercè’s help in ridding the city of a plague of locusts, awarding her co-patronage when the insects eventually buzzed off.

Tough luck for Santa Eulàlia, you might think, and all the more so because La Mercè has become Barcelona’s emblematic day of celebration. But the festival of Santa Eulàlia retains a certain charm nevertheless, particularly for those who have children.

In fact, to La Mercè’s flash and hedonism, Santa Eulàlia offers tradition, child friendliness and a spectacular array of light art, with Santa Eulàlia now incorporating LlumBCN, Barcelona’s festival of lights.

This year, the event saw the city turned into a “giant canvas”, according to Barcelona Mayor Xavier Trias, “where artists paint the city using technology as if it was a paint brush”, transforming areas like the Parc de la Ciutadella and the Plaça de Sant Jaume into living exhibitions of light, courtesy of bespoke installations and projections beamed onto some of Barcelona’s most iconic buildings.

The park was especially impressive: I may have visited on a rainy Saturday night but I was charmed by what looked like a paper heart, hidden in the trees, which pulsated along to thunderous Euro techno as children watched on entranced. It was spectacularly pointless, seemingly random and all the better for it.

Equally impressive, if somewhat more low-key, was the use of subtle, refracted lighting to transform the Convent de Sant Agustí into a gothic fish tank (pictured above), just the place to spend an early Saturday night floating among the purple patterns.

Best of all though was the correfoc dels Diables Petits, which managed the near impossible task of making the correfoc – essentially a load of people dressed up as devils spraying spectators with fireworks in tightly packed streets – even more Health and Safety unfriendly, by giving over the devil costumes and fireworks to a load of kids and letting them run free, in a way that would make most British councils faint with the sheer audacity of it all.

Of course, to visitors from Britain having a festival of light in Barcelona probably doesn’t make much sense. February may be among the city’s coldest months but there’s still a fair amount of sunshine, creating the impression that the beach season may be just around the corner.

If you compare the situation to, say, a February in Dundee, you might think that the Scottish city would be better served with getting out the light installations than the Catalan capital.

But no matter. Santa Eulàlia’s lights are a delight, an unexpected sunny bonus and a reminder of how good Barcelona can be at reinvigorating its history without destroying it.

La Mercè may have the glamour, then, but Santa Eulàlia has the charm.

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