Five years after the showdown with Madrid, the region remains split over secession – and even those who back it are divided on how to achieve it. Do the people still have the will to go it alone?
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.
