There are usually two key themes. One is religious. Nearly all the fiestas are tied in to the patron saint for the village. The saintly effigies usually get an outing. Sometimes the saints stay away from home for days and sometimes they just get a quick tour of the village. There are as many variations as saints.
The other theme is eating, well eating and drinking. Most of the Pinoso villages have a sit down evening meal. Occasionally the meals are classy with ceramic plates and decent cutlery but usually it's plastic plates and glasses with mass catered food. The quality of the meal is importantish, it's always a topic of conversation afterward, but really it's the sitting and chatting and drinking and laughing that matters.
The dinners used to be followed by showband type bands, orquestras playing paso dobles and jotas. As budgets shrank, in the smaller villages, so did the number of musicians and nowadays it's often a playlist and a laptop. Mind you people have been complaining that the Motomami tour by Rosalía doesn't have any live musicians either!
The activities to go with the feasting, drinking, dancing and religious observance can be legion. Traditional games are very usual. In this area something, a bit like horseshoes, called tanganilla or caliche, is common, a cooking competition (traditionally for men) making gachamiga (a sort of garlic pancake) is standard issue too, maybe a communal picnic, vermouth sessions, foam machines, water slides or bouncy castles for the kids, cake and a drink type sessions - chocolate with churros, horchata with fartons, sometimes basketball or football competitions or even summer cinema. I've seen things as mundane as domino competitions and face painting and as innovatively simple as beer tasting sessions. It all depends a bit on your budget and it all depends a bit on what is considered acceptable in your neck of the woods.
The activities are a bit academic. Village fiestas are not really about activities. They are about nattering to your neighbour, having a beer or a wine and remembering old so and so alongside the opportunity for a bit of partying.
One of the key figures in organising the village fiestas in the Pinoso area are the pedáneas or pedáneos. Britons tend to describe these people as village mayors or mayoresses but they are more actually the interface between villagers and the local administration. They also represent the village in any number of local functions. So if the street lamp outside your house fails or if you feel the bins are not being emptied properly the idea is that you moan to the representative and they pass on your moans to the town hall. Our village rep is Belgian. She's hard working and organised. She, and her family, seemed to have done most of the work to organise the fiesta. The one area where there were probably other willing helpers was with the organisation of the religious part of the proceedings.
The programme was similar, but different, to the pre Covid years. On the Friday evening there was a vermouth session - a few litres of vermouth, nuts, crisps, olive and mixers and space to chat. On Saturday there was a market for second hand stuff and for craft stalls and the like. There was nothing for the Saturday afternoon. The evening meal on Saturday evening was organised into tables for friends and family groups rather than the more usual long table free for all. There was nothing on Sunday apart from the all important evening mass and procession followed by the "Wine of Honour" which is a sort of end of event stand up buffet.
Looking in, as someone who knows nothing about how things were organised and as someone who is not particularly integrated into the village, it felt as if the fiesta had a different emphasis to past years. It had a more businesslike feel. The timetable was more precise and none of the smaller elements were there - no competitions, no kids games. In fact, mass and procession apart it could have been almost anywhere sunny in Europe. The evening meal for instance was absolutely Spanish but the menu didn't feature anything that might be alien to a Dutch or Scottish diner. Anyone who saw the advertising and wished to could have a stall at the market or a place at the dinner table. That meant there were far more people involved than usual but not, necessarily, villagers. The religious ceremony maintained its village base with almost nobody, except the invited dignitaries and musicians, not having ties to the village.
It was nice to have the fiesta back.
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