La Mercè and the Art of Turning Up: Barcelona's Street Festivals

If you have just moved to Barcelona and you are wondering where everyone actually meets, here is the happy secret: a lot of the best socialising in this city happens for free, in the street, and nobody checks whether you were born here. Between late summer and the end of September, Barcelona throws itself a run of neighbourhood parties that are open to anyone who turns up, and for a newcomer they are one of the gentlest ways in.

The festes majors: every barri has its own party

Almost every neighbourhood in Barcelona holds a festa major, its own annual street festival with concerts, communal dinners and traditional performances. The most famous is the Festa Major de Gràcia in August, a street-decoration competition running since 1817, where more than two dozen streets spend the whole year secretly building themed decor out of recycled materials and then unveil it all at once. You wander from an underwater world into a jungle into something out of a film set, and it is completely free to stroll through.

Right after it comes the Festa Major de Sants in the last week of August, with the same decorated-street spirit, and through the year you will find versions in Poblenou, Poble Sec, Sant Andreu and beyond. If you are new here, pick whichever one is nearest your flat and just go. Standing in a decorated square with a plastic cup and a live band is a lower-pressure way to feel part of a place than almost anything else.

La Mercè: the big one, and it is very soon

The headline event is La Mercè, Barcelona's main festival in honour of its patron saint, held around 24 September. It marks the turn into autumn and takes over the whole city with free concerts, street arts and Catalan traditions you will not have seen anywhere else. If you have only just arrived, this is the week to clear your calendar.

A few things to look out for, because the names can be baffling at first:

• Castellers: teams building human towers up to nine or ten levels high, a tradition on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Genuinely breathtaking, and the crowd noise when a tower goes up is something else.
• Correfoc: the "fire run", where drummers and costumed devils send fountains of sparks through the streets. Wear cotton, not synthetics, keep a respectful distance if you would rather stay clean, or dive in if you are brave.
• Gegants and capgrossos: the giant figures and big-headed characters that parade through the old town.
• The piromusical, a fireworks-and-music finale that closes the festival.

You can find the official rundown of the city's festivals and popular culture on the Ajuntament de Barcelona's welcome pages, which are written with newcomers in mind and kept up to date each year.

Going alone is completely normal

The thing nobody tells you: turning up to a festa on your own is not weird here. These events are built for wandering, and half the crowd is drifting between a concert in one square and a castellers display in another. That said, everything is more fun with a couple of people to point things out and translate the programme, and that is the gap a community fills.

Where meeting people gets easier

Barcelona has a big, friendly English-speaking scene of expats, internationals and newcomers, and plenty of it organises around exactly these moments in the calendar. That is a lot of what we do at Keep Calm. We are a free, volunteer-run community, and alongside our regular sport and social sessions we are the kind of group where someone will say "a few of us are heading to the correfoc, come along" and mean it.

If you want company for La Mercè, or just a standing invitation to the next thing happening around the city, the easiest first step is to join the community and hop into the WhatsApp group, where you can see what is coming up and when the next meet-up is. No sign-up fee, no pressure to commit, just a way to make sure you are not reading about the party the day after it happened.

Barcelona makes it unusually easy to go from "I know nobody here" to "I have plans this weekend". The street festivals are already in full swing, they cost nothing, and they are the friendliest front door the city has. We would love to see you at one.