The week before Easter sees some of the most solemn and deeply emotional of Spain’s many festival seasons, filled with religious devotion and sacred traditions. At the heart of the celebrations remembering the passion of Christ are the processions of penitents.
Most processions in Andalucia begin taking place the Sunday before Easter, Domingo de Ramos (Palm Sunday), but in smaller towns they sometime begin the following Thursday, Jueves Santo (Maundy Thursday). Statues and other religious images, often draped in rich vestments and surrounded by flowers, are carried on piers by robed and usually hooded penitents. These are accompanied by other penitents, usually fellow members of cofradias (brotherhoods),walking slowly along routes that wind through the streets.
Holy Week in Seville
One of the most dramatic Holy Week celebrations is in Seville, where baroque statues of the Virgin Mary with crowns of silver and gold are carried under canopies in more than 50 different processions each made up of hundreds of people. Each group begins at its own church and its route converges with all the others before reaching the huge cathedral (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). After passing through the cathedral they return by a different route. The processions carrying the most venerated of these statues are in the very small hours of Good Friday morning, and people stand beside the routes all night watching them go by. Fervent flamenco songs are sometimes sung as they pass.
Granada’s Semana Santa
In Granada one of the most spectacular nights is Holy Wednesday, when the caves in the hills of the Sacromonte are lit with bonfires as the Cristo de los Gitanos, Christ of the Gypsies, is brought out in procession. On Holy Thursday the streets fall silent for the procession of the Cristo de Silencio, accompanied only by the beating of drums. On the night of Good Friday the Soledad de San Jerónimo brotherhood proceed through the streets with members dressed to portray biblical figures. On Easter Sunday children have their own parade, carrying pottery lanterns.
Preparing for Easter in Malaga
In Malaga, where some of the statues are so heavy that they require more than a hundred penitents to carry them, on the Wednesday of Holy Week the image of Jesús Nazareno is central to a long tradition of each year freeing a prisoner, who then accompanies the procession. Before daylight on Good Friday, a statue of the Virgin Mary is carried through the streets, in a procession lit by the long candles carried by penitents.
Barbara Rogers - Traveler, writer and guidebook author with a passion for those lands that border the Mediterranean Sea and the neighboring Atlantic ...
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