Life in Culebrón

Easter Week, Semana Santa, is huge in Spain. After all Easter is at the very heart of the Christianity and lots of Spanish events are still tied in to the Roman Catholic calendar. Easter Sunday is the culmination of Holy Week when, so the story goes, Jesus Christ rose or was resurrected, from the dead. On Good Friday Jesus was executed by crucifixion and he was put in a guarded tomb. When some of his women followers visited the tomb on Sunday they found the tomb empty. It is an article of faith with Christians that Jesus rose from the dead. Between Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowd, through to his crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday there are lots of other Easter scenes: the trial by Pontius Pilate, Peter, Jesus's follower, denying - three times - that he knew Jesus before the dawn cockerel crowed, Jesus's walk up to Golgotha or Calvary carrying his own cross and the help he received along the way, the crucifixion scene its...

All the time we've been here and we've never been in Sax Castle before. It's only just down the road too, maybe 30 kilometres. We remedied that today with a theatralized visit. I saw the poster somewhere, sent an email and I was told to email back on a specific day as the visits were always oversubscribed. I did as I was told and got a couple of places. The story the players acted out was about the second Marquis of Villena taking possession of the lands around Sax Castle. When they were telling the story I realised that this particular Marqués de Villena was the one who lost the family the lands around Villena, another local town. He backed the wrong side at the time of the famous (in Spain) Catholic Monarchs, the ones who sent Columbus off to find some spices. There is still a Marqués de Villena, the twenty first. The eighth one set up an institution to protect the purity of the Spanish language which now produces the Spanish dictionary of reference. The Villenas are a ...

We went into Pinoso on Wednesday to see the Procession of the imprisoned Jesus. He was escorted by the Roman Century and two of the be-hooded brotherhoods plus a couple of groups dedicated to different incarnations of the Virgin. To be honest I have no idea what was actually happening despite having seen this, or processions very similar to it, tens of times in our time here. In fact a British couple newly arrived in Pinoso were asking Maggie which of the long Good Friday programme in Pinoso were the ones not to miss and, when it came down to it, we were guessing. One of the events IN CAPITALS for the Good Friday programme for Pinoso is the encounter between The Verónica and Our Father Jesús. Google tells me that The Verónica, according to the Christian tradition, was the woman who, during the Viacrucis, handed Jesus a cloth to wipe away his sweat and blood, a cloth on which his face was miraculously imprinted. Then I had to Google Viacrucis. It seems to be Jesus's journey fr...

I began to laugh out loud. My head was ringing. It was about 2am and all around me people dressed in a motley uniform of black robes and red scarves plus any number of personal touches from cigars and sunglasses to multicoloured wigs were walking up and down banging the hell out of drums. Big drums, little drums, every size of drum. Children, adults, teenagers. bang, bang, bang. I was in Hellín where they celebrate the Resurrection by banging on drums. They call it a tamborada from tambor the Spanish for a drum. As far as I could see there was no organisation to the event. People turned up with any number of friends or family and banged drums. I laughed because I suddenly thought how mad it all was. Not a decent snap all night. The flash ones look horrid and the ambient light ones are all blurred. But you should get the idea.

Usha mentioned in the Archers the other day that Alan, the Ambridge vicar, was very busy at Easter. If it's hectic in Borsetshire then it's positively frenetic in Spain with religious processions and events everywhere at Easter time. We have good Easter processions in Pinoso. There are, I think, eight different groupings five of them with the tall conical hats (the ones the Klu Klux Klan thought scary enough to copy) a Roman Legion and a group of women dressed in black and wearing mantillas. I went out to see a couple of the processions but this year I missed the one that I think is most impressive on  Maunday Thursday/Good Friday The reason I missed it was that I was in Cartagena to see the equivalent procession there. I have to say that the Cartagena processions were incredible. Thousands and thousands of penitents, as many different costumes as anyone could imagine with attention to detail in every facet from perfectly straight marching lines and co-ordinated movements d...

We've been in Spain a while now and we've seen lots of Easter processions. The routine varies from town to town and procession to procession but the basic formula is the same. Individual squads dressed in pointed Klu Klux Klan hats and heavy, floor sweeping robes, escort carved, blood stained Christs and religious banners through the streets to solemn music based on slow, repetive drum beats. It can be impressive stuff but as it happens every night of Holy Week with extra processions to move this or that statue from one spot to another it soon drags as a spectator sport. My procession count this year has been low so I went, for the first time, to see the midnight procession that marks the start of Good Friday here in Pinoso. The town was pitch black. The street lights were off. The house shutters were down. The only light came from rogue phone boxes and bank machines. No cars were moving. People walking to the procession trod quietly with none of the normal chatter. Nobody ...