Car Free Day coincides with Mercè festivities
Workshops promoting sustainable mobility, games, and gastronomic bicycles driving popcorn makers substituted the usual traffic on Barcelona’s Via Laietana yesterday to celebrate Car Free Day, part of European Mobility Week, which coincided with the city’s La Mercè annual festival.
The councillor for ecology, urbanism and mobility, Janet Sanz, said that every year more Barcelona people get involved in Car Free Day. “Today is a day to raise awareness and to show that we can move around in a different and sustainable way to contribute to having cleaner air,” she said.
With the event this time coinciding with the Mercè festival, and also falling on a Saturday, meant it was an “atypical” year, according to Sanz, and with its onus on promoting other ways of moving around the city, it offered a new way to celebrate the local festival.
The workshops and games took place on the stretch of Via Laietana from plaça Antoni Maura to passeig Isabel II, from 10am until 2pm. The event put a focus on children, with the little ones provided with rugs with wooden games, large white sheets for feet painting, murals for spray painting and trampolines.
Other attractions included bicycle-related activities, circus events and even a sustainable meme generator.