On June 8, 2014 at noon, eight human tower teams (colles) built eight towers (castells) simultaneously in eight European capitals at the event called “Catalans Want to Vote: Human Towers for Democracy”. The rally was organized by Òmnium Cultural, one of the two most influential Catalanist pro-independence NGOs. The deployment of this traditional sport across Europe aimed to call international attention to Catalan desires to vote about the question of independence from Spain. The castells action fer pinya, which refers to the building of the base of a human tower, became analogous with laying down the foundations of a new country. This is how the rally's promotion explained the choice of this cultural performance for the vindication of voting rights:

The day after the Catalans Want to Vote rally in 2014, images of the event populated the media, showing human towers on the most emblematic squares and next to the most famous buildings of Europe: Berlin's Alexanderplatz, Brussel's Grande Palace, Geneva's Place des Nations, Lisbon's Belem Tower, London's Tower Bridge, Rome's Gianicolo, Paris's Eiffel Tower, and Barcelona's Sagrada Familia towers.

“Building castells is building nation”, I heard repeatedly from castellers at similar rallies during my two-year-long fieldwork in Catalonia, where I performed with the Castellers de Barcelona “gang”. As expressions of desire and ideology, buildings have their particular mythic effects; architecture, Roland Barthes writes, is “always a dream and a function” (1979, 6).