Lorraine Williamson
What happened in Barcelona at the weekend is being talked about as a “therian” story. That is only partly true.
The bigger story is what happens when a social-media trend, curiosity crowds and mockery culture collide in a public space faster than police planning can adapt. In this case, a gathering linked to the therian trend around the Arc de Triomphe drew thousands, spiralled into disorder and ended with arrests.
A viral meetup that reportedly attracted more spectators than participants
El País reported that the gathering ended up drawing a large crowd, many of them there out of curiosity or to ridicule the event rather than to take part in any genuine therian meetup. The paper described the outcome as a “bluff” and said the crowd size surged well beyond what the original idea appeared to involve.
That detail matters. It suggests this was not simply a niche youth subculture event that got out of hand. It was a viral convergence event, where online attention became the main fuel.
Why the policing angle has become central
A follow-up El País report focused on police coordination, saying the incident was marked by operational misalignment between the Guardia Urbana and the Mossos d’Esquadra as the situation escalated. The report describes how the response evolved after disturbances, object-throwing, and vandalism, with public-order control eventually tightened later in the evening.
That shifts the conversation away from internet spectacle and towards a more serious local-news question: how city forces prepare for fast-moving crowds triggered by social platforms, especially when the crowd itself is mixed, and motives vary.
The arrest total is part of the confusion — and a lesson in early reporting
One reason the story has spread so widely online is that different arrest numbers circulated over the weekend. Early coverage and agency-based pickups widely reported five arrests, while later El País reporting described four arrests, including three minors.
For readers, this is a useful reminder of how quickly figures can shift in breaking incidents as police forces update or consolidate detention data. It is also why the strongest wording for publication is to note that multiple arrests were made, while using the latest sourced update in the body text.
The real issue for Barcelona is copycat crowd behaviour
Barcelona is used to large gatherings. What makes this episode different is the combination of youth trend visibility, irony-driven attendance and opportunistic disorder.
In practice, that creates a difficult policing environment. A meetup may begin as something small, but once it becomes a viral target, the crowd composition changes. The event is no longer just participants — it becomes spectators, prankers, people filming for content, and those looking for confrontation. El País’s reporting on the weekend points directly to that mismatch between the expected event and the actual crowd behaviour.
Why InSpain.news readers should care beyond the trend itself
This is not just a niche internet story from Barcelona. It is part of a wider pattern across Europe and Spain: online calls, memes or trend-based gatherings can pull in large numbers very quickly, especially around teenagers and young adults, and city authorities are often left managing an event that no longer resembles what was advertised.
The “therian” label may be what got attention. The public-order challenge came from what followed: crowd spillover, disruption and the speed at which a social-media moment turned into a street-level incident.
What this leaves for the next weekend
Barcelona’s weekend disorder is likely to be remembered online as a bizarre trend story. City officials and police, however, will probably remember it as a planning problem.
The lesson is not about one subculture. It is about how quickly a loosely organised meetup can become a public-order event once the internet turns it into a spectacle.
When a trend goes mainstream, the crowd changes before the police plan does
That is the real takeaway from Barcelona: not whether therians are a trend, but how viral curiosity can overwhelm the original event and create a very different risk on the ground.