Ojalá hubiera venido — I Wish I Had Come

Semana Santa, the Feria, and the two weeks that define the Sevillian year

Lesson 59's note mentioned these in passing. This is the detail, because they are the reason Lucía thinks April matters. Semana Santa in Seville is among the largest religious events in Europe. Some sixty brotherhoods — hermandades or cofradías, many of them centuries old — process from their churches to the cathedral and back, carrying pasos: enormous carved floats bearing images of Christ and the Virgin, lifted by teams of costaleros who walk hidden underneath, forty or more to a float, guided by a foreman's knocker. The processions run day and night through the week, the longest of them for twelve hours or more, and the streets are packed at four in the morning. The nazarenos in pointed hoods are penitents, and the hood — the capirote — is centuries older than any modern association an American reader may bring to it, which is worth knowing before being startled by it. La Feria de Abril comes two weeks later and is its opposite in every respect: secular, celebratory and nocturnal. A temporary city of over a thousand casetas goes up on the far bank of the Guadalquivir, most of them private — belonging to families, firms or associations — which is the thing visitors are not told. Getting into a private caseta requires knowing somebody, and wandering the streets between them while everybody else is inside is the classic tourist experience of the Feria. There are public casetas, and they are fine. Women wear the traje de flamenca, men often a short jacket, horses and carriages fill the mornings, the dancing is sevillanas rather than flamenco proper, and the drink is rebujito. It runs until dawn for six days. What Alex actually missed, then, is not two festivals but the two weeks in which the city is most itself. Lucía's se repite cada año is the correct consolation, and her practical point stands: both require booking months ahead, because the whole of Spain has the same idea.