How does the culture of a country portray itself? Never more descriptively than in how it celebrates itself. High days and holidays, festivals and commemorations – paradoxically, it’s through its special public events that a country best articulates its everyday.
Take Norway for example, a nation that keeps itself to itself. Beyond pictures of fjords and the usual noise about whaling, how do we learn what makes that country tick? Simple. Spend three days at a heavy metal festival in a muddy field watching head-bangers release their inner Viking. Over in England, what does a decorous concours of polished vintage cars in the grounds of a stately home express, if not a conceit about how gracious the old hierarchies of class? It’s when a country is at play that its rituals reveal the culture underneath.
Weight and mass are measured in Newtons, but the human towers of castellers in Catalonia are underpinned by three centuries of tradition. Originating in 1712 as a folklore dance in the town of Valls near Barcelona, in 2010 UNESCO accorded the towers the status of Intangible Cultural Heritage. (Shutterstock)
As tourists (it matters not where), sights and sounds get etched into memories by virtue of how different they are to our own everyday at home. But for the citizens, the makers of these scenes, these noises we encounter – these festivals are merely exaggerated markers of what’s familiar to them. Which means centuries-long traditions, deep-woven customs, regional narratives, indigenous behaviors that are shared and intuitively owned. The locals require no guidebook, the intricacies have been absorbed since birth.
So suppose for a moment you find yourself amid a crowd thronging a warren of narrow, candle-lit streets, trumpets blaring, guitars thrumming and the smell of grilling meat burnishing the air. Where on earth might you be? Surely someplace where the language is Spanish.
Spain remains a country rich in rural traditions. Andalusians living in Catalonia keep their heritage alive by undertaking romería – processions on foot – in recollection of their predecessors’ pilgrimages to Rome. (Shutterstock)
In the West today, festivals are mostly manufactured around a singular rationale – a music weekend, a civic anniversary, a large-scale sporting event. But in Spain, fiestas seem somehow birthed by a communal collective imperative begun in long-buried memory. One that’s often connected to the ancient wellspring of religious mystery.
Every day in Spain is a saint’s day. Every day memorializes one of the beatified holy host, from the known disciples to names less familiar. Some are anointed patrons appropriate to their story. The archangel Gabriel, messenger of the annunciation, was made patron saint of Spanish postal workers and the telephone in 1921. Others are more highly specialized. San Julián is not only patron of innkeepers and ferrymen but also murderers and acrobats.
Curiosities like that might seem arbitrary to outsiders. But, if you’re Spanish, celebrating your sainted namesake on their accorded day is as much a part of the cultural fabric as making your own personal birthday a cause for cutting cake.
In the heat of the day, a romería moves slowly towards its destination of a chapel, most likely secluded on a hill, where the formal religious observances will follow the order laid down centuries ago. (Shutterstock)
(A personal memory floods in here of a year I spent teaching English in Mataró, a small town north of Barcelona. One weekend, a train took me south to Tarragona, where a caravan of horse-drawn carts traversed a cobbled square in the evening, and suddenly I was following them on foot, up a shrubbery of hillpaths in the heat, until beckoned to jump onto the last cart in the procession and after some miles we reached a small chapel. This, for an unspoken reason, was the point of pilgrimage for these Andalusians living in Catalonia. Flamenco dances, rhythmic clapping, endless song, wine streaming from spout of the traditional glass porrón raised at arm’s length through the night and on beyond dawn. When the sun rose, sunglasses saved red-rimmed eyes, yet the energy remained unflagging. Until suddenly, at a given moment, the women, in flamboyant flounced dresses, and the white-shirted men in high-waisted trousers and wide-brimmed Cordoban hats, ceased their revels and entered the chapel together, in silence. Where for an hour they gave quiet, hoarse, melodious voice to the reason they had come.)
According to every survey, religion is statistically diminishing in importance in the West. But anyone chancing upon a traditional fiesta in Spain might find cause to doubt that data. No matter how noisy the firecrackers or how thickly the smoke from flares festoons the air, it’s hard to miss that orchestrated moment within the boisterous hubbub when the crowd is tempered, willingly and expectantly, by an interlude of communal solemnity and prayer.
The antithesis of a sideshow, no mistaking the centrality of ancient devotion in a Spanish fiesta, as crowded narrow streets resonate in glowing candlelight during Holy Week in Tarragona, Catalonia. (Shutterstock)
(The following year, Mataró turned into a town wreathed in pagan mystery. At the end of February, in the week leading up to the day of San Severino, in every shop window a loosely hung arc of string was strung, garlanded with… sardines. Not just plain sardines, which might have been unusual enough, but sardines dressed in miniature home-sewn suits or tiny dresses. On the Saturday night, massive iron grill baskets were laid across Plaça Gran, with fires alight beneath, ready for the Burial of the Sardines – a satyr’s feast of wine and charcoaled fish. But first, but first the slow parade through those narrow candle-lit streets, led by priests swinging the burning censers, followed by a white alabaster sainted effigy held aloft, as the townspeople processed behind, chanting the end of the earthly Carnival and the start of the abstinence of Lent. The year was 1985.)
Not all fiestas pause to honor the spiritual. In the small township of Buñol (pop. 9,000), between the hours of 11.00 am and noon on the last Wednesday of August every year, 20,000 people gather in a confined public space and throw 120 metric tons of rotten tomatoes at each other. Why? A jokey spontaneous food fight between a few locals in 1945 spiraled out of hand. Banned by General Franco in 1950 – for the single reason that it lacked any element of religion – popular pressure saw anarchic hedonism restored, and it has continued ever since.
The largest street festival in Europe, Las Fallas de Valencia (15-19 March each year) combines the ceremonial majesty of civic celebration of the saints day of San José with the fiery hedonism of wilder events. A flower offering parade pays tribute to the Virgen de los desamparados, patroness of Valencia. (Alamy)
If La Tomatina is a one-off operatic comedy, the opposite is true of Las Fallas de Valencia. It’s the biggest street festival in Europe. Processions, parades, parties and all manner of side events overwhelm 19 consecutive days from the first of March to the saint’s day of San José. Its ostensible theme is simply to welcome in the spring, but Las Fallas is of such richly layered magnitude and interwoven storytelling unique to Valencia that it’s been designated an intangible cultural heritage event by UNESCO.
The rituals cumulate in four days of burning to a cinder the fallas – massive, intricate, immaculate, wood and papier-mâché caricatures of human and mythical life. (Burning Man is nothing, man, compared to this.) And here again, in physical form, what’s being translated is the intangible culture that the city calls its own – and which, to an outsider’s eye at least, expresses something of the complex essence of Spain.
The fallas that take crews of artists, carpenters, painters and sculptors many months to design and create are enormous constructions up to 20 meters high. They’re judged, then burnt. The fiesta derives from the city carpenters’ burning of wood in centuries past to herald in Spring on 19 March each year. (Shutterstock)
The intense studio workmanship required to lovingly design and painstakingly sculpt these enormous emblematic figureheads and gloriously multi-colored sculptures as sinuously rounded as waves – depictions of paganism and nature, sometimes allegorical and satirical – is undertaken for the sole outcome of their being ritually set alight. What message does that send us?
Does the burning of the fallas not mirror the Spanish cultural disposition to embrace the magical transience of life? It is a short step from here to the existential dramas of the bullring – which, according to every survey, like religion, is an institution also fading in support. We will see which way that goes.
What the fiestas of Spain still offer are doorways to memories and more ancient times. Which is why, when the civic workmen sweep the burnt ashes of the majestic fallas off the city squares of Valencia on the morning of March 20 every year, they already know their job is to do exactly the same thing, exactly one calendar year from now.
Main image: The pageantry of Las Fallas de Valencia, embodied in elaborately embroidered traditional fallera dresses. (Shutterstock)
