Catalans mark their national day on the anniversary of a defeat in 1714
Every 11 September, Catalonia commemorates the day Barcelona surrendered to Bourbon forces, ending its status as a separate state within the Spanish crown. That choice says much about the Catalans: a Romance-speaking people with a long memory, their own language, and a national character described as balancing common sense against creative madness.
Their land has seen many rulers. Greeks founded Empúries, Carthaginians established Barcino, the future Barcelona, and Rome took control by 206 BCE, planting the Latin from which Catalan grew. Visigoths made Barcelona their first Iberian capital in the fifth century. Muslim forces arrived in 718, but with Frankish help a frontier zone known as Old Catalonia held out, and in the 10th century the County of Barcelona broke free of West Francia.
A dynastic union with Aragon in 1137 created the Crown of Aragon, which conquered Valencia and Majorca. By the mid-14th century the Catalan counties were known as the Principality of Catalonia. The Reapers' War that began in 1640 ended with the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, handing Catalonia's northern strip to France. Backing the Habsburg claimant in the War of the Spanish Succession led to the 1714 capitulation and the abolition of Catalan institutions. Autonomy returned under the Second Republic from 1932, was lost when Franco's forces took the region by 1939, and was rebuilt after his death in 1975 and the 1978 constitution.
Catalan is closest to Occitan and counted over 9.8 million speakers in 2011, almost all bilingual in Spanish. In a 2019 survey 31.5 percent of Catalonia's residents spoke it as their first language at home, against 52.7 percent for Spanish. In 2005 it gained .cat, the first internet domain based on a language. Identity is layered: a July 2024 survey found 44.1 percent felt equally Catalan and Spanish.
Writer Walter Starkie summed up the Catalan temperament with the word seny, practical good sense, whose opposite, rauxa, is embodied by artists such as Gaudí, Dalí and Miró. Traditional life revolved around the masia, a farmhouse with land and an extended family. Many Catalans still split breakfast in two, one early and another late in the morning, and pa amb tomàquet, bread rubbed with tomato, remains a staple.
Source: Catalans
