Life in Culebrón

This is the second part of a blog about Moors and Christians or Moros y Cristianos. The first part is called Moors and Christians: the real thing and it gives the history behind this event. This blog is about putting on funny costumes and parading through the streets. The Moors and Christians festivals in all the towns have their own peculiarities. The costumes can be of varying styles, the individual events that make up the whole can be different, there can be different names for something more or less the same, the scale can vary enormously, the duration can also vary, the historical setting for the events may be different and even the type of music the accompanying bands play can have a local dimension. Nonetheless, most have essentially the same principal events. That said please bear in mind that this account has to be generalised and so is not always strictly accurate. The event is, in essence the re-enactment of a fight between two ideologies, Muslim and Christian, so the st...

A friend asked me a very simple question about Moors and Christians, the Moros y Cristianos festivals. What I thought would be a quick and easy blog now stretches over two parts. My usual disclaimer. This is not an academic piece so it is not 100% accurate. Moor is a slightly derogatory term for someone from North Africa. The term Moor doesn't really include Arabs, who come from the Arabian Peninsula, but most Spaniards don't let a little technicality like that get in the way and Moor gets used indiscriminately to include Arabs and, sometimes, with the wider significance of Muslim. Christians means Roman Catholics. It's relatively common for Spaniards to think that Methodists Episcopalians, Calvinists etc. aren't Christian.  Moors and Christians are parades and events that take part in several Spanish regions, Murcia, Castilla la Mancha, Andalucia and Extremadura, but they are particularly associated with the Valencian Community and the area in which we live. They are a...