La Matxà in Vilanova d'Alcolea

I went to see a fiesta in honour of Saint Anthony in Vilanova d'Alcolea last weekend. I've seen some pretty bonkers fiestas in Spain over the years but, so far, this one takes the biscuit. I seriously thought, for a few moments, that I might burst into flames and die in a ball of fire.

Castellón province seems to go to town on Saint Anthony celebrations. The events are pretty obviously pagan at root, with a bit of Christian updating. In 2022 we went to the Santantonà in Forcall where a band of devils take two saints, Anthony and Peter, captive, tie them up and drag them around the streets on the way to be burned in a bonfire. Occasionally the devils are distracted from their primary task of immolation when they spy fair maidens watching the proceedings from their balconies. The devils climb to the balconies intent on another of the three tenets of the classic Viking battle plan: burn, pillage and rape.

This year, as I said I went to Vilanova d'Alcolea, a village with a population a little under 600. All I knew about the event before I went was that horses jumped over fires. The pictures I'd seen showed horses and handlers walking across the embers of a fire. It looked interesting and it looked like it might provide good photos.

When I got to Vilanova early on the Saturday afternoon, the road into the village was blocked off with brushwood. I parked up and walked around the roadblock. Stretching down the street in front of me was more brushwood arranged in neat rows down the centre of the road. As I got towards the centre of the town with the Town Hall, Church and bar there were lots more streets, narrower streets, lined with the same sort of branches.

There was a minor event, a bonfire and firework display at 7pm but the main event wasn't till 10pm so I had to hang around for quite a while. I had plenty of time to study the plans which showed where the horses would run. The detail was in Valenciano, which I don't understand, but I got the idea that there were four minor outings for the horses and then one big, final, race, with cash prizes - and the star prize of a chicken. I guessed that the first races would be along the brushwood lined streets and that later the brushwood would be lit and burned down to embers when the big race would be run. I was completely wrong.

Working on my assumptions about the event I chose a vantage point where I reckoned that with only moving a few metres I'd see the horses pass by twice - more chance of getting a decent photo. When they'd passed I'd be close enough to the official start point, back outside the Church, to see the start of the next race and then go to a different viewing spot. Wrong again.

At 10pm, the official start time, the place was heaving with bodies. I'd seen the horses being prepared and dressed up with fancy embroidered blankets and, as I waited for the horses to arrive at the church, I noticed that nearly everyone was wrapping scarves around their face, pulling on woolly hats, fastening up jackets and putting on gloves. It was obvious they were dressing to minimise possible harm from fire. I was being pushed and jostled by the big crowd so I decided I'd move to my viewing spot. I reckoned that if I didn't do it straight away I wouldn't be able to push through the crowds in time. In fact there were soon so many people at my pre-selected spot that I realised that the chance of taking photos without people in the way were nil. I walked down the street a bit to stand on a quiet bit of pavement. Then, all at once, it started to happen.

A gang of blokes appeared in the street setting fire to the brushwood as they advanced. The horses were going to be running with fire right from the start! The brushwood flared up, suddenly, with big, wild flames. There were sparks and smoke everywhere. It took me a while to register that standing on the pavement was like being about a metre away from a November 5th bonfire on the village green. The difference here was that a never ending stream of young people were fleeing in front of the fire, fleeing from the horse's hooves too in the narrow street. I took a couple of snaps with people barging past me, with my body being toasted by the fire, which was still a few metres away, and that's when I realised that if I didn't run I would be engulfed by flame and burned to death. I have not run so fast or so effortlessly in forty years. I creak getting into bed but I flew up that street heading for the safety of a break in the lines of brushwood. The place I'd originally intended to stand!

It's surprising how quickly you, one, adapts. I began to understand how the event was working. The dozen or so horses, and their handlers, were criss crossing the burning brushwood but so were lots and lots of, predominantly young, people. There were occasional firebreaks in the brushwood where less agile spectators could watch the proceedings in relative safety but still being showered by sparks and choked by thick smoke. I'd been hanging around the village for so long that I knew there were two wider streets sown with brushwood - they would be safer, I'd be able to move along the pavements, close to the action but without being barbecued.  That was my main viewing position for the evening though I did find another place, where three lines of still unlit brushwood met, to have a second stab at taking some snaps. When the horses had passed there I felt I had done it. I didn't stay to see the race for the chicken and I didn't go back next day for the town band or any of the other minor planned events.

I ended up with a couple of hundred pictures. Not a single one of them was in focus and even the best ones were so grainy as to be useless. That didn't stop me uploading them to Facebook and Google photos though! They're towards the end of this album if you want to look

Villages and villages

We went up to Castellón for the weekend, the most northerly of the three provinces that make up the Valencian Community. The place we went was called Forcall and we lodged in an old palace. We were there to see a very odd festival where a couple of saints, Anthony and Peter, are harried by demons who try to burn them to death. My guess is that the roots of the festival are maybe older than Christianity! Whilst we were there we wandered around some of the nearby villages, mostly just over the order into Teruel, one of the provinces that makes up Aragón. If you want to see the snaps they're in this album which is just a part of the January 2022 photo album that you can access from the tabs across the home page, or here

Teruel is quite famous in Spain for being the back of beyond. At the last General Election for instance the province elected an "MP" as a member of the party "Teruel Exists". Teruel is always used as an example of España vacciada - emptied Spain. It's one of those staples of newspaper and radio articles, about how most of Spain is nowadays empty with nearly all the population living in Madrid or somewhere near the coast. The usually cited hotspots for this depopulation are the provinces of Teruel, Soria and Cuenca but, in trying to find some simple factual information for this blog post I came across a learned paper that said that Teruel, Zaragoza, Ciudad Real, Albacete, Sevilla and Asturias all had clusters of incredibly low population density similar to those in Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. You may notice that those countries are quite a long way North with a tendency to inhospitable climates. Even in the North of Spain, where it rains a lot, or up in the high Pyrenees, Spain isn't quite in the same class, climate wise. 

The villages we were wandering around have a particular feel to them but there are similar villages and small towns all over Spain. We have a friend who runs a casa rural in Teruel and one of the villages near her house is of the same character. Huge houses with enormous wooden doors, high rooves, impressive masonry, coats of arms on the façade mixed in with much more humble houses and, of course, a big, often colonnaded, Town Hall with the massive church alongside. I wondered where the money came from. These villages look as though, at one time, they were awash with money, nowadays they are often nearly empty with the carefully modernised weekend home next to a derelict barn. A not too exhaustive bit of Googling suggests that the answer is the obvious one and that the majority of the past wealth came from agriculture. Sometimes the hillside goats producing enough wool and milk to make the local land owners rich and, sometimes, the olive trees or cherries doing the same in more arable areas. After all Pinoso had an economy based largely on wine, esparto and salt before the marble became important and that wasn't all that long ago. It always strikes me as odd though that there are so many places in the boon docks that make peacock like shows of wealth. I was born in West Yorkshire and, there too, the Pennine hillsides produced wool. That wool made the hillside villages rich long before the Industrial Revolution moved the wealth production to the valleys. But none of those Pennine villages can compete in shows of ostentation with the similar sized villages in Huesca or Cantabria. 

Over the years we have heard explanations of why this or that village is how it is. We were in one village where everything revolved around pig keeping, down to the street design and house architecture and I remember some guide, on a Duero river cruise, telling us that villages on the border with Portugal became rich through contraband coffee (Portuguese links with Brazil). In Trujillo, in Extremadura, it was the loot brought back from the New World by some of the more well known Conquistadores that built the huge palaces and churches. It may be too that the style of architecture, and the fact that the villages have largely stood still through time, marks the difference.  Novelda made plenty of money out of both marble and saffron and that money built the big "Modernista" houses in the late 19th and early 20th Century but Novelda is too contemporary to be a good backdrop for an Edwardian TV drama whereas Mirambel would be perfect for a Mediaeval one.

There aren't any of these, one time rich, now impoverished villages around here but, of course we live in a part of Spain that has an out of character rural landscape. The normal pattern for most of Spain, away from the big cities, is that houses are grouped together in villages and towns rather than peppered across the landscape. It's easiest to see at night where, in provinces like  Salamanca or Cantabria or Ciudad Real, the landscape between villages is pitch black. It's nothing like the scattering of individual houses and hamlets, the patchwork of lights that you will see shining out from the fields and hillsides around here. I've heard that the difference is because of the old Moorish system of irrigation channels of this area made that dispersion possible but that doesn't sound like much of an explanation to me. In exactly the same way as I'm still not convinced that all the rural palaces and massive churches were built on the back of agricultural profits. After all there are hundreds of agricultural villages all over Spain that look like they've never been rich and simply look scruffy. What I do know is that if you haven't had the opportunity to travel outside the immediate area it's definitely worth taking a look.

Benicàssim

Spain is full of "pop" festivals. I think the biggest is now the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid but the one we were at over the weekend, the Festival Internacional de Benicàssim or FIB, certainly used to be the biggest. There are lots more - Primavera Sound, The Barcelona Beach Festival, Bilbao BBK Live, the Rototom Sunsplash Festival, Low Festival, Sonorama, Arenal Sound and many more.

We were last at Benicàssim in 2008. That time we were in a very small tent and we slept on stones. Although we still tell stories about seeing Enrique Morente, Calvin Harris, Leonard Cohen, Morrissey or La Casa Azul we decided that we would never do it again. At least we would never camp again. We were too old, too bone breaky. So now, with me drawing my pension, Maggie decided we would go back and we'd stay in a tent. She called it glamping. I didn't argue. I like festivals. I have to be honest that I much prefer the first bands on. I like them because everything is more comfortable - no moshing, the dope smoke comes in wisps rather than clouds, beer spilling and glass throwing is at a minimum, the bars are empty and the toilets are passable but, even better, the bands try really hard in the hope that they may become enormously rich and famous. There may be only be a few score people watching them but, maybe, one is an A&R scout. And, for the audience, there is always the possibility that as someone in that elite audience years later you will be able to say -"Ah, yes, we saw Bowie (or Beyonce, U2, Rihanna, Bob Marley, the Fugees, Elton John, Madonna etc.) in the back room of a boozer in Scunthorpe in 1965", changing the names, places and dates as appropriate.

We've looked at going to Sonorama, in Burgos, and BBK a couple of times but, by the time we look the hotels are already full. With sharp rocks to the forefront of our minds we've generally gone to just one day of a festival and chosen local events or ones where we have found somewhere more sybaritic to stay. The Low Festival has been a favourite and I used to enjoy SOS 4.8 till it disintegrated but we've also done much smaller festivals like EMDIV and The B side because they are local.

So, back in Benicàssim, near Castellón, about 250 kms from home. Maggie likened the glamping to life in a refugee camp. Living under canvas, cramped, very public with rubbish everywhere and an inadequate infrastructure. I think I'd prefer to be at the worst festival than, say, at Bidi Bidi in Northwestern Uganda but the comparison was solid. Obviously she didn't really mean it and I wouldn't want to trivialise the human suffering that refugee camps represent but I could see the parallels even if we had nothing but good weather, we were unencumbered with dependants and our washing machine was waiting for us back home. On the other hand it is true that, if you are used to an en suite bathroom and you need a toilet at 6am then having to slide onto the floor, pull on some shoes, unzip the front door of your tent, go ouch!ouch! with the sharp stones, weave between the disgusting detritus on the ground, say hello to the all night drinkers and walk hundreds of metres to get to the toilets that have had a more or less endless stream of backsides parked on them for 96 hours and which, despite the best efforts of a couple of cleaners, are less than spotless and come with a sort of toilet paper laden impromptu paddling pool on the floor, can feel like a bit of an effort. At least at 6am there is no twenty minute queue.

Showering was an even more public spectacle. Most, though not all, did it dressed in swimwear. There were plenty of showers, maybe a hundred, all fed by cold water but with a lot of abandoned shampoo bottles and toothpaste and fag packets floating in the gutters. Some of the showers dribbled onto the concrete floor constantly whilst others didn't work at all. I was impressed with the unerring accuracy of the one stream which always drenched my towel wherever I hung it.

I was talking to a Spaniard from Navarre, from Tudela. He was a hardened festival goer in his early 20s but he complained that he was finding it hard work. He grumbled about the distances between the tents and the campsite facilities, between the campsite and the festival site, about the distances on the festival site, about the poor beer and about the unremitting heat. It never got above 33ºC whilst we were there which is hardly hot for Spain. Bit of a moaning Minnie in my opinion but it certainly wasn't comfortable and the blisters on my feet are still making it difficult for me to walk after two days at home. Be that as it may we got to see a lot of bands and we met some very pleasant people. Oh, and there was beer too. Some of it, a certain quantity of it, interfered with my vision!

Most of the young people were as concerned about how to keep their phones functioning as anything else and proved infinitely resourceful.  I was equally impressed with the effort that so many put into sorting out their outfits for the evening. The effort that some of the young women, put into their hair and gluing on the facial rhinestones astonished me. My only preparation for the evening was to sniff my armpits before concluding that my t-shirt was good for another few hours.

Festivals suit my short attention span. With three or four stages on the go all with overlapping bands I can watch someone do three or four songs and then move on without feeling guilty. With some of the bigger acts it's much more likely that you will see the full set but not always. We wandered from The Kings of Leon to Jess Glynne for instance. Eclectic or what? It's difficult to say how many bands we saw, working on needing to hear three songs minimum to say that you saw a band, it was probably close on 30 which isn't bad at all. There were very few of the "usual" Spanish Indie bands, presumably because there are so many British Fibers, but the range was still pretty good. From the very neat George Ezra, to the surprisingly impressive Fatboy Slim or the very annoyed Action Bronson to Alien Tango where the guitarist flaunted his Murcian heritage by wearing the traditional baggy shorts or zaraguelles.

I'm really glad that Maggie forgot just how uncomfortable we were eleven years ago.

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Lineup: Kings Of Leon, Lana Del Rey, Fatboy Slim, Franz Ferdinand, George Ezra, Jess Glynne, The 1975, Vetusta Morla, Marina, Action Bronson, AJ Tracey, Alien Tango, Barny Fletcher, Belako, Bifannah, Black Lips, Blossoms, Cariño, Carolina Durante, Cassius, Cora Novoa, Cupido, DJ Seinfeld, Ezra Furman, Fjaak, Fontaines D.C., Gerry Cinnamon, Gorgon City, Gus Dapperton, Hot Dub Time Machine, Kodaline, Kokoshca, Krept X, Konan, La M.O.D.A., La Zowi,  Mueveloreina, Mavi Phoenix, Octavian, Or:La, Paigey Cakey, Peaness, Project Pablo, Sea Girls, Soleá Morente & Napoleón Solo Superorganism, The Big Moon, The Blinders, The Hunna,  Yellow Days, You Me At Six.