With chants of “the streets will always be ours” and “independence”, the massive crowd assembled rather than marched in their allotted sections along the street. Once again, the independence movement demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to mobilise its base, filling about four miles of Diagonal, the city’s broadest street, with hundreds of thousands of flag-waving supporters dressed in T-shirts bearing the slogan: “We’re making the Catalan republic”. Organisers said 460,000 people registered to take part in the rally, while police in Barcelona put attendance at about 1 million, making it roughly the same size as last year’s event. The issue of independence remains divisive in the region, with polls suggesting Catalans are almost evenly split on whether to stay part of Spain. The annual Diada celebrations commemorate the fall of the city at the end of the Spanish war of succession in 1714, but in recent years they have been used by pro-independence groups as a show of strength. About a million people have gathered in Barcelona to renew their calls for Catalan independence and to demand the release of jailed political leaders almost a year after the unilateral referendum that triggered Spain’s worst political crisis since its return to democracy.
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