Dancing in the streets

I saw something about the fiestas in Cañadas de Don Ciro this last weekend. Now Don Ciro really is no more than a wide spot on a very rural road but they have fiestas. It reminded me that I hadn't written anything about our own local fiesta which was a couple of weekends ago now. 

The Culebrón fiesta is one of a series for the outlying villages which are part the Pinoso municipality. The first village fiesta takes place in late Spring and they go on through the Summer with the villages taking it in turns to have a weekend of festivities. The fiestas are not usually particularly exciting or expansive but they are deeply ingrained in local culture and they offer the villagers a break from the routine with a chance to have a bit of a natter with friends, family and neighbours against the backdrop of some planned activities.

There are usually two key themes. One is religious. Nearly all the fiestas are tied in to the patron saint for the village. The saintly effigies usually get an outing. Sometimes the saints stay away from home for days and sometimes they just get a quick tour of the village. There are as many variations as saints.

The other theme is eating, well eating and drinking. Most of the Pinoso villages have a sit down evening meal. Occasionally the meals are classy with ceramic plates and decent cutlery but usually it's plastic plates and glasses with mass catered food. The quality of the meal is importantish, it's always a topic of conversation afterward, but really it's the sitting and chatting and drinking and laughing that matters.

The dinners used to be followed by showband type bands, orquestras playing paso dobles and jotas. As budgets shrank, in the smaller villages, so did the number of musicians and nowadays it's often a playlist and a laptop. Mind you people have been complaining that the Motomami tour by Rosalía doesn't have any live musicians either!

The activities to go with the feasting, drinking, dancing and religious observance can be legion. Traditional games are very usual. In this area something, a bit like horseshoes, called tanganilla or caliche, is common, a cooking competition (traditionally for men) making gachamiga (a sort of garlic pancake) is standard issue too, maybe a communal picnic, vermouth sessions, foam machines, water slides or bouncy castles for the kids, cake and a drink type sessions - chocolate with churros, horchata with fartons, sometimes basketball or football competitions or even summer cinema. I've seen things as mundane as domino competitions and face painting and as innovatively simple as beer tasting sessions. It all depends a bit on your budget and it all depends a bit on what is considered acceptable in your neck of the woods. 

The activities are a bit academic. Village fiestas are not really about activities. They are about nattering to your neighbour, having a beer or a wine and remembering old so and so alongside the opportunity for a bit of partying.

One of the key figures in organising the village fiestas in the Pinoso area are the pedáneas or pedáneos. Britons tend to describe these people as village mayors or mayoresses but they are more actually the interface between villagers and the local administration. They also represent the village in any number of local functions. So if the street lamp outside your house fails or if you feel the bins are not being emptied properly the idea is that you moan to the representative and they pass on your moans to the town hall. Our village rep is Belgian. She's hard working and organised. She, and her family, seemed to have done most of the work to organise the fiesta. The one area where there were probably other willing helpers was with the organisation of the religious part of the proceedings. 

The programme was similar, but different, to the pre Covid years. On the Friday evening there was a vermouth session - a few litres of vermouth, nuts, crisps, olive and mixers and space to chat. On Saturday there was a market for second hand stuff and for craft stalls and the like. There was nothing for the Saturday afternoon. The evening meal on Saturday evening was organised into tables for friends and family groups rather than the more usual long table free for all. There was nothing on Sunday apart from the all important evening mass and procession followed by the "Wine of Honour" which is a  sort of end of event stand up buffet. 

Looking in, as someone who knows nothing about how things were organised and as someone who is not particularly integrated into the village, it felt as if the fiesta had a different emphasis to past years. It had a more businesslike feel. The timetable was more precise and none of the smaller elements were there - no competitions, no kids games. In fact, mass and procession apart it could have been almost anywhere sunny in Europe. The evening meal for instance was absolutely Spanish but the menu didn't feature anything that might be alien to a Dutch or Scottish diner. Anyone who saw the advertising and wished to could have a stall at the market or a place at the dinner table. That meant there were far more people involved than usual but not, necessarily, villagers. The religious ceremony maintained its village base with almost nobody, except the invited dignitaries and musicians, not having ties to the village.

It was nice to have the fiesta back. 

To everything there is a season

This time it's about localness and the annual flow of events but, as always, there's a long and sinuous lead in.

We moved here in 2004 and, at first, we knew very little about the ebb and flow of the Spanish year. As we hunted for a house to buy we rented in Santa Pola and, one evening, as we watched the telly, I got really fed up with the thud, thud thud of a couple of drums in the street. It was obviously a pair of lads on their way back from band practice. I went onto the balcony to give them a right rollicking only to find 50 blokes carrying a big frame on their backs and practising that rhythmic swaying that they use to manoeuvre the Easter floats. The drums were to mark time. I turned round and turned up the volume on the telly. We didn't know about the enormity of the Easter celebrations in Spain.

Just before our first Pinoso Fiestas, in the August of 2005, I was talking to a bloke called Ian who'd lived in Pinoso for a while. The first stall holders were beginning to set up and streets were closed to traffic. He pointed towards where Consum now is - Over there will be a stall selling knives, over there is where you'll get the best chips and don't forget to buy a waffle from el Flequi, he'll have his van up by Lothermans. He'll be playing Rock music. Ian had done the fiestas a few times and knew the drill.

Spanish Internet services were not well developed in 2005. I was hunting for something entertaining to do with our weekend. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across a calendar of events for the town of Novelda. The calendar listed what would happen for the Fiestas of Santa María Magdalena, it stressed the growing importance of Carnaval. There was a snag though, to me a serious flaw in a calendar, no dates. Joy turned to despair. I was angry enough to send a snotty email, in my dodgy Spanish, complaining that the town only cared about people whose grandparent's grandparents had lived in Novelda and they should be aware that life in Spain was now conditioned by the arrival of lots of we foreigners. They didn't reply of course, nobody ever replied to emails in Spain in 2005, but they did add dates to the calendar. 

This last Sunday I saw an event advertised for a guided tour of the Teatro Wagner in Aspe. I went and did the tour. It was interesting. As we looked around it became obvious that I was the only person who didn't live in Aspe. Lots of people on the tour knew the guide, Mariano, and those who didn't know him directly knew of him. They also knew the local councillors who were shadowing the tour. When Mariano talked about this or that event, this or that local personality and this or that place then everybody else knew what, or who, he was talking about. There was no problem with me being there but why would someone from Pinoso go to an event in Aspe?

The cyclical nature of things isn't particular to Spain. All over the place night follows day, Summer follows Spring and Easter and Christmas (at least in nominally Christian countries) come around year after year in a predictable way. It's the same everywhere and for lots of things from the Grand National to Halley's Comet. The date of Eid ul Fitr Eid is based on the sighting of the Lunar crescent and Diwali is on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Indian calendar. It always seems to me though that Spain, at least rural Spain, is more cyclical and more locally orientated than the place I was brought up. 

Spanish people seem to be happy to repeat what they do each year and to do it in the same place. It's unlikely that someone from Valencia would think to travel to the rival Fallas in Denia or that someone from Jumilla would go to see the Easter floats in Tobarra. Spain also seems very keen on the permanency of things even if they aren't that permanent. I often snigger at the posters that say that the Christmas Circus will be in the "usual place" even though it moves every year or the fiesta programme that says that the route for the Flower Offering will be the traditional one. The assumption is that the people who are going to a local event will know where the circus is or where the traditional route goes. One year Pinoso only did the leaflet for Villazgo event in Valenciano even though the town shares a border with three Castellano speaking municipalities!

There is though a feeling of permanece, of repetition, to so many Spanish events and something too of geographical immediacy. As the Easter procession in Pinoso moves along Calle Monóvar it will stop for someone to sing their saeta from the balcony and I'll be as emotional as I get when they shout ¡Costaleros! - ¡al Cielo con El! as Easter Thursday becomes Good Friday outside the Church in Pinoso. Over in Elda the torchlit procession will wend it's way down Monte Bolón at Epiphany. In Holy Week, in Malaga, the Legion will carry the Cristo de la Buena Muerte on their shoulders. On the 6th July at 12 noon they will launch the chupinazo, the rocket, from the 2nd floor of the Town Hall in Pamplona to get the Sanfermines under way and in Elche on the 14th and 15th of August lots of men and boys will dress up to deliver the Misteri d'Elx mystery play in ancient Valenciano in the Basilica just as they have done from the middle of the XV century.

And so on because: to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.