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Saint George's Day

Wednesday, April 23 2008 All Day

Sant Jordi is the patron saint of Catalonia and Aragón, and his saint's day is a public holiday in both. For Catalans, it is also Lovers' Day, their Valentine's Day, and to complicate matters further, it is the anniversary* of the deaths of the two greatest writers the world has ever seen, Shakespeare and Cervantes. Catalans solve this with the kind of breathtaking ingenuity you just don't find anywhere else - he presents her with a red rose, she gives him a book, or both books and roses may be exchanged. *In fact, Shakespeare died about a fortnight after Cervantes, but the different calendars then in use in England and Spain conspired to make the dates the same.

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