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.

Well, I didn't know that!

I've recently been in one of those linguistic slumps where I feel that my Spanish is so deficient that self flagellation seems appropriate. These dark moods are brought on when I come away from some film without having understood the plot or when I've no idea what the people in the queue behind me are talking about. It happens too frequently. This time my response was to give up on my one to one online, italki, Spanish lessons. My penance began just before Christmas.

It didn't last long though. I've spent years and years trying to speak Spanish and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up now. Well, that's today's position statement anyway. Tomorrow it may be back to deep despair and a retreat to comforting chocolate treats.

So, I'm online and nattering to Miriam. On my insistence our sessions don't have any structure. I just wander from this to that topic. It has been suggested to me that my thought patterns are a bit random anyway, which must be particularly trying for a Spaniard attempting to decipher my linguistic deviations in mis pronounced non sequitur conversations peppered with dodgily translated idioms. 

I was talking about the walk I went on in Elda last weekend. I went to collect firewood for the Hogueras de San Antón. Miriam wondered what I was talking about. "You know, the bonfires for Saint Anthony". She apparently didn't.

The event itself was interesting. A group of around 60 people set off from a little chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony in Elda to another little chapel on the Barranco Gobernador, behind the Campo Alto Industrial Estate. About a third into the journey a mule cart joined us. When we arrived at the destination chapel, and after the obligatory pause to eat a late and extended breakfast, people began collecting twigs and branches as symbolic firewood for the bonfires which are one of the traditional ways to celebrate the Saint's day next weekend. The firewood was handed to the cart driver who stacked it neatly. The whole collection routine was serenaded by a dulzaina and drum band. With the wood collected the band took to playing dance music and a group of women improvised a version of a traditional dance. Then I walked the 7kms back to the car. 

Miriam asked me why we were collecting wood for San Antón. I was a bit surprised. This particular event is, obviously, specific to Elda but, so far as I know, celebrations for San Antón are pretty widespread. We've been with a cart collecting wood in town for the same thing in Villena and I know that there are bonfires in Úbeda down in Anadalucia. There are more up at Forcall in Castellón. In fact Forcall looks about as pagan as you get with blokes dressed in overalls, daubed with devilish symbols, harassing a couple of people dressed as Saints with blacked faces, big hats and mandarin fruit necklaces. The devil's crew also bounce pigs bladders on sticks in front of pretty girls and they all dance around a huge town centre bonfire. Very Wicker Man. Whilst there are no bonfires, or misplaced bladders, in Pinoso for San Antón we usually have the horses on the street and the local priest blessing animals in front of the church. When we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo they dressed the door of the church with sausages and black puddings, as well as blessing pets. There was something in Cartagena too when we lived there, I forget exactly what but it involved choirs. The point is that there are San Antón events of one sort or another in every corner of Spain but Miriam, who's smart, she's doing her PhD, didn't know what I was talking about.

Fiestas conversationally forgotten we went on to talk about fibre washers. I wanted to know if it were a direct translation from English to Spanish - arandela de fibra. Washer is not a common word but we had no problem in agreeing that we were talking about the same thing, the small flat rings that go between two joining surfaces to spread the pressure or act as a spacer or seal. Fibre was more difficult. I tried suggesting that it was a bit like the old "cardboard" suitcases or like those storage boxes that we used last century for document storage and which got a new lease of life at IKEA as hip storage solutions. We never got there; we abandoned the conversation. I said it didn't matter anyway because, always, in an ironmonger's, you end up describing the use of the thing as you never know the technical term. "I don't know what it's called but you use it to get the juice out of oranges" Miriam agreed; she said she too had to describe things in ironmonger's and told me the tale of wanting a support to put on her gas cooker so that her coffee maker didn't overbalance. She didn't know the word. Obviously. Nobody does. She went on to suggest that sometime the technical term was useless anyway because, often, it's unshared knowledge. She gave me an example. She was cooking and she asked her boyfriend to pass her the espumadera. Apparently an espumadera is a big slotted spoon, the Spanish presumably comes from the idea of skimming off froth. Do you know the technical term for that sort of spoon in English? I don't.

And the point of these ramblings? Well, living in Spain I have less back catalogue than I had when I lived in the UK. I can't sing along to many songs here, old Spanish films mean nothing to me, when someone aged 85 dies and Spain goes into mourning I wonder who they were, why they were important. I feel that I'm sort of failing to "integrate". When Spaniards ask me if I've ever eaten a paella it suggests that they can think of us a breed apart but I'd like to be equally offended when someone asked me if I enjoy the work of Leticia Dolera. The truth is though that it's just normal to not know everything about anything. Otherwise how could we keep on learning new things till that moment we draw our last breath?

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P:S. If you're thinking of trying the online learning thing and you decide on italki if I recommend you and you take up some sessions we both get a discount of some sort. It's easy to message me.