There are over 2,000 bell towers across Catalonia alone, and they all need tolling each half-hour; but it’s actually so much more than that.
To better interweave communities and keep long-practiced traditions alive, Spain is witnessing a class graduate from its first bell-ringing school.
This strange idea is all about reviving a dying art that was recently inscribed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible World Heritage, featuring human activities like baking, dancing, and poetry, that tell the story of our species’ cultural diversity across time and across countries.
Over the last 120 years, manual bell-ringing has gradually been replaced by automatic systems in Catholic and Protestant churches, which has flattened their potential and muted their messaging powers.
“We have the utopian goal of a toller in each bell tower. I know it’s a utopian goal because there are over 2,000 bell towers across Catalonia,” admits Xavier Pallas, a bell-ringing instructor at Vall d’en Bas School of Bell Ringers, who just graduated his school’s first class.
He says that despite there being more effective means of communicating than bell-ringing, its function serves as an important method of local communication that binds and unifies communities in times of grief and joy.
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What will come perhaps as a surprise is that, depending on the order, tone, and number of chimes, churchbells in Spain announced everything from fire alarms and bad weather warnings, to when the fishermen were arriving with the day’s catch, and even how much it was going to cost.
“We need to keep these rituals in both cases,” says Pallas.
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18 pupils have graduated, and another 60 are on the waiting list, all of whom, like Pallas, agree that bells and bell-tolling have the potential to strengthen communities in this dizzying age of technological, economic, and political change.
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