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

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.