On Sunday 12 June hundreds of locals, tourists and ex-pats packed picnics into cool boxes, grabbed their sunhats and piled into cars to drive to Miravet, a pretty hillside village on the banks of the great river Ebro which produces a good quantity of Catalunya's cherries.
Those that got there early bagged the shadiest of the trestle tables set out under the trees around the village square. Competition was so great for the best spots that a fist fight broke out at one. One particularly organised group set their table with a cloth, china plates and terracotta water jugs, then began to create individual bouquets for each place setting. We got out our scratched old plastic plates, disposable forks and cracked open the cans of Mahou.
Around the square were stalls piled high with boxes of cherries - bright red ones, dark red ones, purplish ones and orangey ones. More stalls were selling pottery (another Miravet speciality), wine, cheese and textiles. As we drank our beer, had a few snacks out of the coolboxes and wandered around the stalls, a huge paella was being prepared at the corner of the square. A very hot chef threw bucketfuls of rice and chicken into a paddling-pool sized dish over a big wood fire and stirred it all up with a giant spatula. A woman trolleyed two-litre plastic bottles of red wine to our tables and another delivered huge platefuls of cherries.
Once we had all feasted and drank and chatted, a band plugged in their amps and the dancing began. Later, cherry cake and a strong dark liquer were served. As dusk fell we decided we had had our fill of sunshine and cherries (and beer) - until next year.
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