Valls Calçotada Festival 2021: the year it was cancelled

The 2021 edition

• Location: Valls (Tarragona)
• Status: celebration suspended

From a scaled-down proposal to cancellation

The news published by ACN on January 21 explained that a format without an audience had been studied, with online monitoring and some activities such as sauce and calçots eating contests. That proposal did not become the announced celebration: the final decision was to suspend all activities.

Travel restrictions affected participants from different municipalities. With this condition, the organisers ruled out maintaining the planned contests. When consulting newspaper archives it is possible to find previous announcements of a reduced version; To know what really happened, we must distinguish them from the final cancellation communication.

Documentation: ACN / Vadegust: Festa de la Calçotada suspended due to COVID-19

There was no virtual calçots eating contest

The official communication from the Chamber, the City Council and the organisation confirmed the suspension of the Gran Festa. The objective became the promotion of the season through videos on the Chamber's YouTube channel. The presence of digital content explains part of the subsequent confusion, but a promotional video is not equivalent to a competition.

This is why this archive identifies 2021 as a disruption. A number of the celebrated edition is not assigned, nor is the 2020 winner transferred to the 2021 box. The next result of the contest corresponds to the return of 2022. Keeping this gap documented makes the chronology clearer than filling it with a celebration that did not exist.

Documentation: Organisation: suspension of the Gran Festa 2021 and promotion of the season · Organisation: historical record of the calçots eating contest

The take-away calçots helped maintain the season

La Cambra published a list of around twenty restaurants in the Valls area that offered cooked calçots to take away. It was a response to a season in which it was difficult to gather the usual groups and receive visitors from other municipalities. The initiative sought to sell the product and support restaurants and businesses.

That list is a historical document, not a current guide to open establishments or available services. To organise a meal today, it is advisable to consult our current selection of restaurants and confirm the conditions directly. The interest in recovering the 2021 campaign is in showing how calçotada continued in domestic formats and take-out orders.

Documentation: Cambra de Valls: campaign for cooked calçots to take away

A year essential to understanding the archive

Preserving 2021 allows us to read with meaning the editions that surround it: the great meeting of January 2020, the suspension and the return of 2022. The history of a festival is not made up only of records and photographs of full squares; It also includes the decisions that interrupted its celebration.

This archive brings together the documented outcome and separates the festival from the gastronomic campaign of that season. The old restrictions are mentioned only to explain that context. To follow the evolution of the meeting, the next step in the archive is the 2022 edition, which recovered public activity.

Explore more of the festival

Learn about the calçots eating contest and check its record →

Check the next edition of 2027 and discover the calçotada restaurants from Valls and Alt Camp.

Return to archive of all editions →