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Fourteen holidays, and why your town has one nobody else does
Spain has around fourteen public holidays a year, which is among the most in Europe, and they arrive in three layers. A handful are national: New Year, Reyes on 6 January, Good Friday, the Asunción on 15 August, the Hispanidad on 12 October, All Saints on 1 November, the Constitution on 6 December, the Inmaculada on 8 December, and Christmas. Each autonomous community then sets its own — Sant Jordi and the Diada in Catalonia, the Día de Andalucía, San Fermín in Navarre, the Día de la Comunitat Valenciana — and finally every municipality gets two local holidays of its own, which is why Alex cannot buy bread and why the shop forty kilometres away is open as normal. Those two local days are almost always the patron saint's day and one other, and the patron is specific to the place: Santiago for Spain as a whole, San Isidro for Madrid, la Mercè for Barcelona, la Virgen de los Desamparados for Valencia, San Fermín for Pamplona. The saint is the occasion rather than necessarily the content — attendance at Mass may be thin while the verbena in the square is packed — and the festival is best understood as the town celebrating itself, with the calendar borrowed from the church. Lesson 82's Fallas and lesson 77's bulls sit inside exactly this structure. The shape of a town fiesta is remarkably consistent across the country. It opens with el pregón, a speech from an invited guest, often from a balcony. There is a verbena on the eve, with a stage and a band and lanterns strung between the buildings, running until three or four in the morning and attended by everybody from teenagers to grandparents. The saint goes out in procession the next morning behind a hermandad and its drums. Somewhere in the week there is a romería out to a hermitage and a vast picnic, a parade with cabezudos chasing the children, a meal in the street, and fireworks to finish. Small towns empty out for most of the year and refill for this week, because people who moved to the city come home for it. Semana Santa deserves its own note because it varies more by region than anything else in the Spanish calendar. In Seville and Málaga it is vast, public and emotional, with hermandades processing day and night for a week, saetas sung from balconies, and streets impassable. In Castilla — Valladolid, Zamora, Cuenca — it is austere and silent, drums and no music. On the Mediterranean coast it competes with the first good beach weather. In much of the north it is mainly a holiday. None of these is the real Semana Santa, and a visitor who has seen only Seville has seen one version of it. The practical advice is dull and important. Check the local calendar before you need a bank, a chemist or a train, because a municipal holiday will not appear in the national list and nothing warns you. During a town's fiestas expect no post, no builders, no appointments, considerable noise until dawn, and a genuinely warm welcome if you turn up at the verbena — the one thing nobody in Spain finds odd is a foreigner who came for the fiesta.