JOANETES, Spain. The rich, resonant sound of church bells once again fills the lush valleys of Spain, thanks to an effort to revive the traditional art of hand-rung bell tolling. Xavier Pallàs, standing in the belfry of a small stone tower, grips the rope and fills the air with the powerful clang of a swinging bronze bell.

“Clang-clong! Clang-clong! Clang-CLONG!” The bell’s melody echoes through the valley, temporarily replacing the natural soundscape of birdsong and rooster crows. For most, the sound of church bells is a quaint bit of automated background noise. But Pallàs and his 18 students at the Vall d’en Bas School of Bell Ringers are on a mission to bring back the lost art of hand-rung bells and their historical significance.

Over the past century, mechanical tolling devices have replaced the dynamic and meaningful songs of manually rung bells. According to Pallàs, the school’s founder and director, these devices have muted the bells’ messaging powers. “For centuries, the tolling of church bells was our most important communication method,” Pallàs explained. “Machines cannot reproduce the richness of the sounds that we used to hear, so there has been a simplification and unification of bell ringing. The language has been lost little by little until now, when we are finally recognizing its worth.”

Before modern communication methods like newspapers, radio, and the internet, bell ringing was crucial for transmitting important information. Being a bell ringer was a demanding job, requiring dedication and long hours, acting as both a human clock and a public loudspeaker.

While manual church bell ringing has continued in Eastern Orthodox countries, it has largely been replaced by automated systems in Catholic and Protestant churches in Western Europe. Many of Spain’s church bell towers, automated in the 1970s and ’80s, are now in disrepair. Pallàs witnessed these issues firsthand while researching the belfries of Garrotxa, a county in northeast Catalonia.

His research included the 12th-century Sant Romà church in Joanetes, where he has spent the past 10 months teaching the inaugural class one Saturday a month. “Since the last generation of bell ringers had died off, the only thing to do was to train new ones in how to toll the bells. And that’s where the idea of the school was born,” Pallàs said.

Intangible Heritage

This initiative comes two years after UNESCO added a manual bell ringing in Spain to its compendium of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage. UNESCO described how the bells had knitted together communities even before they were functioning in modern states. “The first thing we have to do is rediscover the bells. That is why this school is so important,” said Roman Gené Capdevila, president of Catalonia’s Bell Ringers brotherhood. “There are so many ways to ring a bell, what we need are bell ringers.”

The bell-ringing course, officially recognized by the ISCREB theology school in Barcelona, concluded last week with a demonstration by the class. Drawn by the allure of the bells, the students came from diverse professional backgrounds, ranging from engineering to teaching. They spent months researching old chiming sequences, documenting their origins, and learning to play them. This ethnographic task involved tracking down old bell ringers or their families to record their knowledge.

Roser Sauri, who works in artificial intelligence, was among the students. She jumped at the chance to reconnect with her childhood by recovering and playing the chiming sequence that had sounded in her grandfather’s village when he was baptized. “The bells formed a part of my life,” Sauri said. “When I visited my family, I began to associate the sound of church bells with being back home.”

The Human Touch

Students took turns tolling sequences for everything from calls to Easter Mass, bad weather warnings, and help for fighting a fire to orders for the village militia. The students tolled a gamut of death announcements that could specify gender and social class. Juan Carles Osuna, a church mural painter, performed a complex sequence with all four of the belfry’s bells, requiring him to sit with ropes looped around his hands and feet. “Whew! It’s an emotional experience. You feel your blood pumping. You feel the strength, and how you are communicating with everyone in earshot,” he said. “For me it is an honor, it’s a way to honor both humans and God.”

Osuna emphasized the unique human touch in manual bell ringing. “The (automated) hammer will always be mathematically precise,” he said. “There is emotion in the human touch. There is a human element.”

A Promising Start

What might seem like a quixotic mission has so far had a promising start. While admitting that his dream of having a bell ringer for every bell tower is “utopian,” Pallàs said he has a full class lined up for the fall and some 60 more people on a waiting list. Many of his graduating pupils, including Sauri and Osuna, hope to continue playing at their local parishes or help convert their belfries into systems that allow manual ringing.

Pallàs believes that reviving bell ringing can help strengthen communities in this age of technological, economic, and political change. “This is a means of communication that reaches everyone inside a local community and can help it come together at concrete moments,” he said. “That can include a death in the community or the celebration of a holiday. It can help mark the rituals that we need.”

As the metallic melody fades and silence returns, the efforts of Pallàs and his students ensure that the rich tradition of hand-rung bells will continue to resonate through the valleys of Spain.