Girona flourishes as flower festival preparations get underway 

The city of Girona is preparing for a new edition of Temps de Flors (flower season). Their annual flower festival held usually in May, will this year showcase its flowers like normally after drought restrictions have been lifted. 

A total of 146 floral projects will be spread across 114 exhibition spaces, with natural flowers making their turn to the courtyards as well, as drought restrictions have been lifted due to recent rain and higher capacity reservoirs across Catalonia.  

Although the exhibition officially opens on Saturday, many courtyards and displays have already begun taking shape on Thursday. The steps of Girona’s Cathedral will be transformed into a carpet of hydrangeas, ferns, and grass.  

Plaça del Vi will be one of the main entry points to the festival. This year, the Smilax School of Floral Art has created a forest. To do so, they’ve wrapped several of the square’s columns with green foliage and red leaves.  

"We’ve distributed this project across different columns. Though the budget we presented was cut back a bit, we’ve tried to distribute it in such a way that people get to see everything and get a complete picture of the whole project,” Núria Simons, one of the city’s florists explains to Catalan News Agency (ACN). The idea of coloring the trees is meant to symbolize the city’s energy and pace. 

While in Plaça dels Apòstols, there are two more installations to be encountrered. One aims to tell the story of the city’s ancient stones. In front of the cathedral doors, Pere Anton Parellada and Carla Fuster will build a three-meter-high “barricade” of soil sacks to “remember how heritage is protected in times of war.” The plants symbolize hope and the arrival of peace.  

Temps de Flors began in 1954 as a small flower exhibition in the Municipal Theatre and has since grown into one of the most important and cultural tourist events in Girona.  

Back in 2022, Catalan News visited the Temps de Flors flower festival for a special episode of our podcast, Filling the Sink.