Why Easter and Semana Santa are poles apart

Seville is a city that doesn´t do things by halves. For someone hailing from a country that´s constantly self-apologetic (that’s Britain, in case you’re wondering), the Andalusian capital´s overarching, certainty and self-belief is both intoxicating and bewildering at the same time.

Take Semana Santa, with its literal translation of holy week rather than Easter. So there-in lies the first major difference. In other countries, Easter unceremoniously squeezes itself onto the end of an ordinary, working week and passes as an excuse for some much needed DIY, eating too much chocolate and that’s about it. But in Seville, Semana Santa takes things to a whole gargantuan level.

The term Holy ‘Week’ is in fact underselling its immensity. Year after year the painstaking preparations begin immediately after the previous year’s Easter Sunday has only just finished.  Where Semana Santa is concerned, there’s no rest for the proverbial wicked; from the marching bands honing their haunting, medieval renditions, to the costaleros (the meaty guys who carry the religious statues on their sizeable shoulders) rehearsing their micro-moves so that the irreplaceable images of the virgin and Christ remain intact manoeuvring around the city’s tight medieval, corners. Only in August they might take some time off.

Then there’s the week itself. Over 7 days 55 hermandades or brotherhoods make the journey from their usual place of worship to the cathedral and back again. No mean feat when there are approximately 115 pasos (the floats carrying the often life-size images of the Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary), some accompanied by over 2000 Nazarenos (the pointy-hooded members of the brotherhoods that these days include women and children), so that seeing just one Hermandad file past can take over an hour. And that’s not even mentioning ‘la bulla’, the unfeasible large number of crowds shoehorning themselves into tight spaces to get the processional view they’ve been dreaming of all year.

You see Semana Santa is a serious business. Sure there’s beer to be drunk and ‘guapa’ to be shouted at the occasional passing of a statue of the virgin. But if you’re to get the full experience then it’s watertight, military planning that’s needed. It’s a bit like when you’re at a large music festival and several of your favourite bands are playing at the same time at different ends of the festival site. And to compound matters, a journey that would ordinarily take 10 minutes suddenly takes two hours. Steely determination, planning and patience are the name of the day.

But somehow it seems to work and tradition wins the day. Indeed, every echelon of Seville society makes an appearance; from rather tough looking, working class adolescents, proudly playing their instrument of choice in the Semana Santa band, to the Ralph Lauren clad, ´pijos´ eyeing up the pretty girls between passing statues of the virgin, to the elegantly dressed ‘señoras´ who death defyingly combine skyscraper heels and cobbles without taking a tumble once.

For me, as a self-proclaimed ‘crowd fleer’ I doubt whether I’ll ever have the nerves to immerse myself in Semana Santa, Seville stylie. In the meantime, I’ll just live vicariously through the experiences of people like Curro, aged 11, who can’t wait to go out as a Nazarene, like his father and grandfather did before him. And when recently I asked him if one day his children would also be Nazarenes, without a flicker of doubt in his eyes he asserted, ‘Claro que si’ (of course). And you know what, I think they probably will.

 

Curro somewhere on the left with his cousins

 

 

 

The silent towns of Catalonia

Conesa (Picture Alexandra Sans Massó)

Flying into London can be an overwhelming experience. If you take a particular trajectory, it can feel like the whole of southern England rushes towards you as a seething mass of human life, with no breaks for nature amid the grey hues of habitation.

England - and in particular the affluent Southern regions - are crowded. The UK as a whole has a population density of 255 people per square kilometre and this rises to 419 in England, making it second only to Malta as the most densely populated country in the EU.

Spain, by contrast, has a population density of 91 people per square kilometre, putting it at the spacious end of the spectrum. Not that you’d really notice it in Barcelona where I live: the city has an eye-popping 714.9 inhabitants per square kilometre according to the Institut d'Estadística de Catalunya, putting it right up there with London, Moscow and Athens. Not only that, but city living in Spain tends to mean being cooped up in flats, with just a balcony for comfort (or a terrace if you’re lucky), anathema to the garden-loving British.

Take a step outside Barcelona - or more of a car ride, really - and all this changes, as population density falls through the floor. Sometimes it can feel almost uncanny, as town upon town passes by your window with no sign of inhabitation beyond the odd stray dog and a flair of graffiti. Welcome to the silent towns of Catalonia.

I’ve got to know many of them over the years: there’s Foixà, a charming rural village in Baix Empordà with a fixed population that feels like it could fit into the town’s well-preserved castle, home to a bare-bones shop, a homely restaurant and a bar that defies the binary logic of open and shut.

There’s Querol, a beautiful hamlet nestled in the castle-strewn mountains of Alt Camp, almost unreachable by public transport, whose entire population comes together in the town’s titchy square to celebrate the festa major on August 15. And there’s Arsèguel, an eagle’s nest of a village in the the Pyrenees, whose citizens are dwarfed in number every summer by accordion lovers, as the town welcomes Europe’s largest gathering of acordionistes. Just this month I discovered Conesa in the Conca de Barberà, a town so small that a Google search turns up pages of references to a Barcelona sandwich bar before the true Conesa shows its face.

In a way there’s something rather depressing about these places. They’re not ghost towns in the truest sense of the word although they do feel haunted by the past. Meanwhile, in the present day they speak of the dwindling populations and ageing inhabitants found in so many Catalan conurbations, where the young people have had to move to find work, taking their children with them. There’s something particularly poignant about the orderly little playground that sits next to Querol’s town square, eagerly awaiting local children who simply don’t exist.

As recently as 1920, Conesa’s population numbered 511, for example. Now it has dwindled to less than 100, who rattle around what is a beautifully preserved town, (apparently) flush with cash from the neighbouring wind turbines and with nothing to spend it on. This depopulation turns an inevitable vicious circle, as dwindling populations force the closure of local services, which in turn makes family life difficult to sustain.

And yet despite all this, there’s something I love in the silent Catalan towns. It’s not just the space - the wonderful, liberating, wind in your hair space - that they offer. It’s the spirit: the way villages will celebrate their festa major with a joyous song and dance even if only 35 people are every going to show up; it’s the ambitious plans for high-speed internet connections that might - just might - make these villages into budding work spaces; it’s the man walking his goat who invites you to a calçotada; and it’s the Catalans who will drive 100 kilometres to vote in the town of their birth, years after they’ve left, just because it seems the right thing to do.

It’s the warmth of human life in other words and - perverse though it might seem - the silent towns of Catalonia resonate loudly with it. Long may they continue to do so.