Despite being one of the few national days that commemorates a calamitous defeat – in this case the fall of Barcelona during the war of the Spanish Succession in 1714 – Catalonia’s Diada is seldom a sombre affair.
Each 11 September for the past 10 years, hundreds of thousands of pro-independence Catalans have turned out, often in family gaggles and with flag-trailing pushchairs and dogs, to show their strength and to issue a peaceful call for a split from the rest of Spain.
