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San Antón and the winter fiesta
Most Spanish villages have more than one fiesta, and in the cold interior, where the main summer fiesta draws back the emigrants, the winter ones belong more to the people who actually live there. San Antón, Saint Anthony the Abbot, falls on January the seventeenth and is the patron saint of animals. Across Spain, and especially in rural Castile, Aragón and the north, the day is marked by the blessing of animals: farmers bring livestock, horses and, in towns, dogs and cats to the church door to be blessed. In many places it also brings the first bonfires of the year, las hogueras or luminarias, lit in the square on the eve or the night of the feast, with mulled wine, music and dancing in the cold. In some towns the celebrations involve horses jumping the flames, or parades of decorated animals. For a village of forty people, a fiesta in January is partly a ritual and partly a statement that the place is still alive. That is why Ramiro, who keeps three hundred sheep, cares about it, and why a child at San Antón, the first in years, matters to him more than any project document. The social rule he states is a real one. Village fiestas are organized by residents, often by rotating groups called quintos or peñas, or by a fiesta committee, and being asked to help organize the next one is how newcomers are absorbed. Spending a weekend in January, in the cold, at the fiesta that belongs to the locals, tells a family more about whether they can live somewhere than any number of summer visits, which is exactly why Alex and Ramiro designed the trial weekend around it.