European Balloon Festival

The festival flies from an airfield on the plain behind Barcelona, in a valley that balloons use all year for the same reason it was chosen for the event: reliable morning air and somewhere flat to land. It is the closest festival on the calendar to flights we actually sell — see how it compares with the rest.

It calls itself the largest balloon festival in Europe. So does Bristol, and so did Warstein for years, and none of the three measures the same thing: one counts balloons, one counts spectators, one counts both and publishes neither. The claim is worth knowing about and not worth arguing over.

The Night Glow is what the crowd comes for. Balloons stay tethered on the field and fire their burners in time to music, which is a ground show rather than a flight, and the only part of the programme that runs to a schedule instead of to the weather.

Flights during the festival week are not sold by the festival. The operators who fly this valley all year run their normal service, sometimes with a promotion attached to the event, and they are the same companies you would book in any other week. That is worth knowing because the festival's own listings send you to them without saying so.

For a visitor from Barcelona the practical shape of the trip is an early drive, not an overnight stay: the flying window is at dawn and the road out is empty at that hour. July on the Anoia plain is hot by nine in the morning and the afternoon programme is mostly on the ground.

The airfield is not built for the festival. It is a working aerodrome the rest of the year, shared with gliders and light aircraft, and the festival borrows it for a week — which is why the launch area is properly flat and properly large, and why the surrounding roads can absorb the traffic. Most balloon festivals are held on land that has to be borrowed from farming, and it shows in everything from the parking to the state of the ground after rain.