The Mallorcan flame: the ancestral soul of the bonfires of Sant Antoni
The ability to build a community explains how tradition has been able to travel and find a place in Catalonia.
GironaEvery winter, the city of Girona reconnects with the deep-rooted pulse of fire. The Foguerons de Sant Antoni arrive in the capital of Girona as a ritual that evokes memory, gathering, and community. This festival finds its symbolic reference in Sant Antoni Abat – patron saint of animals, farmers, and the rural world. His presence transcends mere devotion, conjuring a bond between people and their land.
From Mallorca, across the Mediterranean Sea to the Principality, the flame of the bonfires has traveled to preserve and celebrate a meaningful gesture. Gathering people around it, it reminds us that even the harshest January cold can turn warm when shared moments are experienced.
The saint, the land, and the animals
Saint Anthony the Abbot, an ascetic and humble figure, embodies a primal connection with the land and the animals that work and inhabit it. Tradition describes him as a man who, after renouncing material possessions, lived in seclusion with a profound devotion to all living beings. It is said that he healed wounded animals and protected them as equals.
It is no coincidence, then, that the people attributed to him the patronage of the animal world. Nor has his feast day been preserved as a space between Christian devotion and ancient rituals linked to the solar cycle, the fertility of crops, and home life in the heart of winter. Saint Anthony thus becomes a bridge between two often conflicting worlds: the sacred and the earthly, faith and the need to celebrate the enduring nature of life.
The warmth of the fire
In Mallorca, and with particular intensity in Sa Pobla, this fusion takes shape in the bonfires, the true soul of the festival. The first documented references, dating back to the 14th century – specifically to the year 1365 – attest to a celebration that has endured through the centuries without losing its communal spirit.
On the eve of Saint Anthony's Day, the streets fill with bonfires that burn slowly and invitingly. Around them, neighbors play tambourines and sing traditional songs until well into the night, surrounded by the aroma of embers that evokes family gatherings, those evenings when time seems to stand still. It is a collective and almost defiant gesture that defies the cold and transforms the winter darkness into a space of warmth and togetherness.
The presence of the demons, irreverent and colorful figures, completes the ritual. Their dance, beyond its visual impact and spectacle, embodies the ancient and persistent tension between light and shadow, order and chaos. Fire, at the heart of it all, acts as a purifying and regenerative force: an energy capable of renewing, year after year, the pact with the community.
The improvised word and the dance that brings the community together
Around the fire, the celebration becomes voice and movement. For Sant Antoni, song and dance take the form of a glosa (a type of Catalan folk song) and a baile de bote (a traditional Catalan dance). Two authentic elements, two living languages that converge to connect generations and Catalan-speaking territories.
The glosa, with its melodies that each glosador makes his own, is the art of improvisation and dialectical combat. Historically linked to civic and religious festivals, theater, and above all, the tavern—its natural environment—the glosado consisted of a verbal confrontation between two or more singers defending opposing positions. With wit, irony, and verbal ferocity, the glosa took root among the people. In the 19th century, it would become a form of song admired by the island's intellectuals.
The "baile de bote" – which branches out into a set of traditional Mallorcan dances such as the jota, the bolero, the fandango or the same – bursts into the square with a ternary rhythm that invites participation without hierarchies.
Flexible in form and incisive in content, the glosses transform words into play, critique, and celebration. Alongside them, dance reminds us that popular culture is danced, lived, and built, step by step, to the rhythm of the beat.
When tradition crosses the sea
This ability to foster community explains why the festival has traveled so far. In Barcelona, the Foguerons de Sa Pobla in Gràcia, celebrated since 1992, originated from the desire of Mallorcan residents to keep the memory of their homeland alive. Over the years, they have not only succeeded, but the celebration has taken root in the neighborhood, becoming an essential event on its festive calendar, faithful to its original spirit and open to new collaborations.
This year, the flame returns, with force, to Girona. From El Foment, We are promoting a proposal that aims to enhance the profound meaning of the bonfires: fire as the central element and gathering as the essential value. Because beyond the celebration, Sant Antoni and the bonfires of Mallorca remind us that the spark of festivity endures, as long as there are people willing to meet in the square, even in the heart of the cold winter.