Sant Jordi is one of the most awaited and celebrated festivities in Catalonia, but where does this tradition come from? Why do we give roses and books as presents? Why is it on April 23rd? Here are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the festivity.

Queues to enter bookshops. Queues to access the perimeter spaces. Queues, also, to get signatures. The euphoric response of the public has meant that this Sant Jordi - after the obligatory break of the previous year - has exceeded all expectations. The figure given by the Gremi de Llibreters and the Cambra del Llibre late in the afternoon confirmed it: with more than one million copies sold throughout the day, 75% of the sales of 2019 were reached, when the most optimistic forecast predicted 60%. If 22.16 million euros were invoiced during the 2019 festival, in 2021 it will reach 15 million euros.

Sant Jordi 2021 has started strong, with the power of a good fork breakfast with extra spice. This was the speech given by Pol Guasch, a fierce young star of Catalan literature and winner of the Llibres Anagrama Prize for his novel Napalm al cor. "I have been invited because I am young and embody something akin to diversity, but the system we live in doesn't work", said Guasch, who was one of the authors invited to the institutional event held at Barcelona City Hall, where Irene Vallejo was the Sant Jordi town crier. Guasch, unleashed, has done everything but bow his head in front of publishers, representatives of writers, the mayor Ada Colau and the deputy mayor Joan Subirats. "We have to stop addressing the political class to firmly address the people who make the words, who live the words and make literature exist. There are the forces that create and maintain the world and then there are the forces that expropriate creativity in favour of profit. Literature is not rhetoric, it is deviation. Institutional politics and literature are antonyms. In literature there are no pacts or concessions, in literature one does not negotiate with racism, with the persecution of languages, one does not sell the text to the highest bidder, one does not deceive in the name of one's own interest. Literature broadens, it doesn't squeeze", added the author from Tarragona before saying goodbye with an angry plea: "The text that does what we have been able to do, among other places, in Urquinaona, has yet to reach the world".

The festival of Sant Jordi has always been characterised by an exceptional normality: it is a festival on a working day, it is a day when we all buy books and roses as if they were objects of basic consumption, it is a day when the street is tinged with joy without completely breaking with everyday life, it is a day when life takes place more in the street than indoors, when families and friends pay special attention for each other, when smiles are the norm. Sant Jordi is, in itself, an annual collective representation of how we would like to be: for a few hours we behave and portray ourselves as a cultured, civic, friendly society. This is what we want to experience again this year.

This is the week of books, but football has been all over the front pages. This is what reality is like. Books get one day a year, and (men's) football, the whole season. We don't need to be surprised about this. Reading doesn't make us wiser, better or freer. There is a considerable list of imbeciles who have a vast library. What we need to worry about are the economic and social priorities. What's regrettable is that so many people don't publicly throw their hands up in the air about football wiping out everything else and becoming a matter of state. What has been said these days is as delirious as ever. Not that it's surprising because we're already surprised. But we have not yet come out of a pandemic that has left millions of deaths and thousands of consequences and football goes over everything like the economic steamroller that it is. With those values that football clubs pretend to have, when in reality they are essentially bastions of machismo and homophobia, of competitiveness as a stimulus to sacrifice and of demanding. It is not a question of criticising a sport or how everyone chooses to evade the everyday. Escape routes are inscrutable. It is about reflecting and thinking about why they have this preference and who sustains it. Who dominates football, with what objectives and that if Florentino Pérez considers that he has to save football so that in 2024 it will not be dead, maybe it is not such a bad idea to let it die. We remember that his Castor project not only caused earthquakes in Terres del Ebre but we are paying for them. I have always distrusted saviours. But let's get back to books, it's Sant Jordi's week. Once a year. Despite the fact that this is once again a substitute for the festival that used to brighten up our day and our streets. One day this mediocrity will go away.

Sometimes in the small life of an individual, which normally proceeds smoothly, there is an accumulation of events that mark and change its course.

"Sant Jordi is back," said Patrici Tixis, president of the Cambra del Llibre de Catalunya, before announcing what the festival of the book and the rose will be like in 2021. There will be stalls and author signings in the street, but in 11 controlled spaces to restrict capacity, as already advanced by ARA in March. There may also be stalls in the street in front of bookstores and florists from Wednesday to Friday, thanks to a special decree of the mayor, but there will be no other institutions or political parties. "Sant Jordi will take place, there will be stops in bookstores and in the streets of Catalonia with perimeter controls," celebrated Carme Ferrer. The Procicat has endorsed this type of festival

This year for Sant Jordi, on April 23, there will be no large crowds or concentrated stands. In Barcelona, the Diada will be decentralised: booksellers and florists will be distributed in delimited, capacity-controlled enclosures. As the ARA has been able to confirm, if sanitary conditions allow it, the stands will be located in a dozen points throughout the city that will be outdoors, easily accessible and will be perimetered. Landmarks have been sought that are easy to mark out, sufficiently far apart to avoid crowds and where circuits can be organised to allow people to move around without crowding, with access controls and separate entrances and exits.