Finding fiestas

I soon get itchy feet if I’ve spent too many days around the house. Fortunately, there’s nearly always something going on close to where we live to cheer me up. One of the advantages—drawn directly from the disadvantage of living a fair way from anywhere—is that we don’t look to just one source for our “what-to-dos”. If I lived in Alicante, Madrid, or Murcia, I’d expect there to be something going on just around the corner or a short bus ride away. Here, where there are no buses and driving to the larger cities requires a real commitment, it’s a matter of picking and choosing from all the towns and villages around us.

We often go to concerts, theatre, exhibitions, and various other events, but one of the oddities of Spain, at least for me, is that the place is cram-packed with fiestas. Fiestas are not just "events"; there might be a big music festival or a sporting event, but that is not a fiesta. Now, if you live here, you know full well what a fiesta is, but for those who don’t, here is a definition. It reads a whole lot better in its original Spanish, but the translation gives the gist:

The fiesta serves as a collective expression rich with symbolism contained in costume, dances, music, song, beliefs, emotions, gestures, and more. This array of manifestations—often repeated periodically in a more or less specific order—becomes a ritual. While these experiences unfold in the present, they evoke a shared collective memory. Through the fiesta, local people affirm their common identity and their place within that community and, at least temporarily, act almost as a united whole.

Some fiestas are big, big, big, and others are hardly noticeable in any sort of macro way. Even quieter customs carry that same spirit of shared tradition. Around Easter in the Valencia area, families head to the countryside to eat a sweetened bread called a mona. It’s a modest outing rather than a spectacle, but it traces the same ritual line: a yearly reaffirmation of belonging through a small act repeated across generations.

One of my own first brushes with the fiesta as something participative and inclusive was the first time I ever went to Valencia during the Fallas. I’d never even heard of Fallas; I knew nothing about it. By the time I left, I knew very little more than when I arrived, but the people who guided me around had made sure I stayed up until some unthinkable hour in the morning going to verbenas. They ensured that I’d eaten a lot of buñuelos; that I’d half-ignored a whole bundle of mascletás in several districts; and that I’d been shown some Fallas, not for their monuments but for their stupendous light displays—under which the locals ate, talked, drank, danced, threw bangers, and went without sleep for several days, sometimes while wearing clothing from other centuries.

Years later, when I had begun living here, I went to Alicante to see the Hogueras de San Juan. Like the falleros in Valencia, the Alicantinos build huge monuments and set fire to them. There are parades and mascletás, and it is easy to see them and not notice the food, the organisation, or the tiny but frequently repeated rituals.

I was watching the big parade. Floats went past, people waved and applauded, and the "stuck-in-time" traditional clothing wafted by. It so happened that the people who had introduced me to the Fallas were in Alicante too—for reasons difficult to explain, but mainly involving different boyfriend-girlfriend configurations. One of them rang me to ask if I was thinking of coming to Alicante. I said I was already there watching the parade. My friends were in a bar nearby; they could probably hear the parade, but it was of little interest to them. They came and got me and took me to sit around a campfire on the beach, to eat at one of the street stalls that had a reputation for this or that delicacy. They dragged me off to a place where people were dancing to contemporary DJs at one of the barracas because my friends, or at least one of them, had a cousin who might let us in. And he did.

So, in both cases, there is something going on that visitors can look at. For most visitors, fiestas are a bit like going to see a James Cameron Avatar film: there’s plenty to look at, but almost no participation, no emotional entanglement.

I was reminded of this last week. I hadn’t gone down to Murcia for Bando de la Huerta. Good grief, if you want an inclusive fiesta, that’s one to take notes from. Kilometres away—in actual distance, not emotionally—from the organised activities, men and women, boys and girls, sit in the same bars they go to every other day of the year. However, they are dressed in peasant-style clothing, asserting their identity by looking very much alike and doing the things they usually do—only on this particular day of the year.

All over the city, the local bars, the Casa Pepes and the La Taskas, are full of people participating in the fiesta by just being there with everyone else. The trams are crowded with people in "traditional costume". Everyone’s Murcian accent has stepped up a notch or two. Today, they are Murcianos even if they are from Senegal or Romania.

If I didn't go for the biggest day of the fiesta, I did get down to the Batalla de las Flores a couple of days later. It’s a lovely event, but it is very much a "look at" rather than an event to be "lived". It’s not quite like that for the crowds who greet people on the floats as they pass, claiming their place in the city and its fiesta.

Afterwards, I wandered the streets where gangs of young people were well into having a good time quite early in the evening, with or without the help of gin and tonics and Cuba libres. They were with friends, wearing the silly, brightly coloured tunics and conical, dunce-like hats of the sardineros to prove it. They danced and laughed behind their overly lively band as their trolley moved the booze and ice from one street to another. The city heaved with life.

Maggie often says she doesn’t fancy coming with me to see a romería, where a town or village walks its patron saint up or down a hill to some small chapel or monastery. Sometimes people have costumes, sometimes they have arquebuses, and sometimes temporary chiringuitos have sprung up along the route. Maybe there’s a stage to perform on; maybe people just dance where they are or set up their picnic tables under the trees.

She says it’s because she’s not interested in religious things. Neither are most of the people who are there. They’re there because they belong to Novelda or Elche or Sax or Alcoy, and they’re proving it by doing traditional things for today. These customs are constantly changing to incorporate the new and different, but that change is soon assimilated to become "traditional". And, just for a while, the pizzas and burgers are sidelined, and the shops owned by multinationals close their doors to the pressure of ordinary people in an apparently unchanging ritual.