Jordi Puig Ferrer

In every photograph of a human tower the eye goes up: to the child at the top, waving, the enxaneta. Nobody looks at the pinya, the great crush of bodies at the bottom that makes the whole thing possible. Jordi Puig spent twelve years in the pinya, and would not have swapped it for anything.

He was born in Sabadell in 1989, the elder son of a bus mechanic and a primary school teacher. He studied telecommunications engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and in 2014 joined Telefónica, where he spent his career building the networks that carry other people's phone calls, video chats and, he liked to point out, Barça matches. He worked on the rollout of 5G across Catalonia and was known for two things: never saying a problem was impossible, and bringing pa amb tomàquet to the office on Fridays.

At twenty-four he joined a colla castellera, one of the Catalan groups that build human towers up to ten storeys high, and found his place at the base, carrying the weight of everyone above him. The castellers' motto is força, equilibri, valor i seny: strength, balance, courage and common sense. Jordi had all four, and used them on a Saturday afternoon in a square in Barcelona with eight hundred people watching, and on a Monday morning in a data centre with nobody watching at all.

He met Núria Vidal on a hiking trip in the Pyrenees in 2016, proposed to her at the top of a mountain 'to make sure she could not run away', and married her in 2019. Their daughter Aina was born in 2023. He sang to her in Catalan every night, mostly out of tune. He supported FC Barcelona with the good-humoured despair of a Catalan, and cooked a famous escudella every Christmas.

Jordi died on 14 May 2026 in Barcelona after a short illness, with Núria, his parents and his brother beside him. At the farewell, hundreds of castellers formed a pinya in the square outside, in silence, with an empty place at the base. He leaves Núria, Aina, his parents Josep and Montserrat, his brother Pau, and everyone who ever stood on his shoulders.