On Catalan National Day, 11 September, more than 700,000 people took to the streets of Barcelona this year, despite the still ongoing pandemic, demonstrating to the world that the will of the Catalan people to claim the right to self-determination guaranteed to them by the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the two major human rights covenants of the United Nations and to establish a free, independent Catalan Republic is unbroken.
Since several media outside Catalonia tend to report on the Catalan sovereignty movement only from the Spanish point of view and pictures illustrating Catalonia's peaceful striving for independence are often withheld from the public in many countries, I would like to refer below to some articles of the very well and balanced informative independent Catalan news portal VilaWeb, which stands for excellent quality journalism.
In this article you can see aerial photos of the demonstration of 11 September 2022:
https://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/videos-impressionants-imatges-aeries-manifestacio-anc-diada/
Impressive pictures can be found in this article:
https://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/fotografies-mes-espectactulars-manifestacio-diada/
If you have a good knowledge of Italian or French and can understand Catalan (Catalan is not an Ibero-Romance language, but predominantly a Gallo-Romance language closely related to Occitan), you may want to listen to Dolors Feliu's fiery appeal (partly in English) to finally make Catalan independence a reality:
https://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/video-dolors-feliu-o-feu-independencia-o-convoqueu-eleccions/
The European Union will one day be judged by whether it has prevented Spain from suppressing the peaceful Catalan striving for state independence with brutal force using police and military, as would be in line with Spain's previous tradition and self-image and lead to many deaths and injuries. If the European Union were to fail on this central issue, it would lose all credibility and would sooner or later break up.
The Catalan question is the fateful question on which the future of Europe will be decided: Will Europe continue to support the Spanish state's massive human rights violations against the Catalan people or will it stand up for human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Spain? Europe will have to decide. The Catalan people will no longer let Spain oppress them and treat them like a colony. Catalonia is demanding freedom, democracy and the rule of law, its human rights and the realisation of its right to self-determination in the form of its own democratic state, independent of Spain. Will the European Union one day be able to say that it was on the right side of history?