Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Sevilla - and Rota

Friday, April 10, 2009
After getting back from Zamora, we rested for a day and then went to Sevilla for Holy Week. Steve and Robin Kahn joined us for the first few days and it was a delight to show Robin (new in Spain) all the fleshpots of Sevilla and then the first Holy Week activities on Palm Sunday.

Here are Steve and Robin in front of El Toboso, a good place to be found.

Here is Columbus' tomb in the cathedral of Sevilla.

Here is the cathedral itself - it is much too big to fit into a picture. All the processions of Semana Santa come through this cathedral.

For those of you who don't know about this, Semana Santa is a huge event in Spain, but especially Sevilla. Many families are on vacation all week and some bury themselves in religious activities and others go to the beach. For the former group, there is plenty to do. There are 72 cofradias in Sevilla - that would be a group from a specific parish that will actively work in the church activities. There are 3 cofradias in Rota, so you can see the difference in scale. The main activity, besides masses, is a procession in which they carry these huge floats (pasos) weighing sometimes more than a ton around the city. The wealthy churches may have a variety of pasos, some for Palm Sunday, some for Good Friday, etc. The poor churches usually just have two, one of Christ carrying his cross and another of the Virgin Mother. These pasos are usually hundreds of years old and are covered in silver or gold, carved from dark hardwoods, and covered with candles and flowers.

Here is one with lots of carved hardwoods.

They slowly wind their way through the streets to the big cathedral in Sevilla and then back to the church. They are accompanied by many (often more than a 1000 per church) Nazarenos (those guys with the Ku-klux-klan outfits - the idea stolen from them by some bigot). The Nazarenos carry huge candles through the streets and each church has their own color scheme for the outfits.

Here is my cosuegro, Enrique looking down on the littlest Nazareno, who retired to her stroller and took off her capilote (pointy hat).

Here is a proud dad helping junior with some detail of his outfit.

And here one of the Nazarenos is giving candy to kids (which they do during informal moments when the pasos are stopped)

And there is a band with every group too, that plays special holy week music and plays drums in between. The pasos are carried by 40-60 men who shuffle through the streets with a synchronized step that they practice the week before carrying loads of bricks or metal. Since they need to rest from time to time (their route may be several miles through streets so narrow that the pasos can barely fit through), they lower the paso for a break. At that time, singers on balconies will sing Saetas to the Christ or Virgin on the pasos. Ah, Saeta - that's the name of our boat! Saetas are impassioned moorish sounding songs done without accompaniment that are only done during Semana Santa. They are chilling.

Here is the church next to the house with the paso of Christ coming out of the door.

After the Cristo comes out, then the Virgin comes out with 400 Nazarenos and a band of musicians between them.

Here is the paso of Jesus coming back by the house at 2AM with the streets much more empty than when they left at 6PM.

You can see all this much better on TV, but TV can never capture the emotion that you feel when a paso comes by you in the middle of the night with the smell of incense, the thousands of candles, the hushed crowd, the beat of the drums that you feel in your stomach, and the awesome spectacle of the pasos and Nazarenos. One group had a choir of tiny children - really young - who sang so sweetly it made me cry. You have to be in this to really get it, but I try to give you a hint. There are so many cofradias in Sevilla that they all have defined arrival and departure times and colored routes on a map so that you know where to meet them. The problem is trying to get around on foot during this time. It is very difficult because somewhere between here and there you will probably have to cross 3 processions, 1/4 mile long, which takes lots of time. Yesterday there were a million people on the streets!!!! Luckily everything is made of stone because the fire trucks could never get through.

Here is the Virgin coming back to the church at 2:30AM.

We spent 5 days in the house of our wonderful Spanish relatives and then retreated to the relative calm of Rota to see Semana Santa in a small town. It's nice to be surrounded by people we know.