I never put anything up here about Semana Santa because I just haven’t had time, but I feel like it deserves a spot on here. After all, Sevilla is known to have the biggest Semana Santa celebration world wide. This includes “pasos” which are parades through the city. Each Catholic church in the Sevilla area has statues of Jesus and usually a virgin (a Spanish Catholic thing I think… it seems to be a whole other classification of saints but I’m not really sure). Some of them are from the 11th century so there is a lot of history built in. These statue/float type things are carried by 30 men who walk it through the parade. There are also “nazarinos” which are dressed like members of the KKK (no joke) and walk as part of the parade. Some of them carry candles and others crosses. And there are also bands in the parades to. The music is very Spanish… brass… kind of flamenco-ish if that means anything to you. The parades go from the church, to the Cathedral in the center of Sevilla, and then back to the church. Each day throughout the week there are probably 5-10 maybe more “pasos”. The fun of it is to go and stake out a good spot to see each of the parades. You go ahead of the statue floats and then wait and wait until it gets there and then you figure out which paso you should go to next. It’s odd. I didn’t really understand it at first but the more of them I saw, the more interesting it got. It’s not really like anything I’ve seen before but it was definitley interesting.
And then on Easter Sunday, Maria Louisa and Miguel took us to a suburb of Sevilla (not really suburban at all, more like a little town out in the country) and they had a neat picnic and pasos of their own. Spaniards know how to do the picnics though. There were families who brought a folding table, 2 coolers and everything on a dolley. I thought it was funny. On top of that, people just shared all of their food. You came with your cooler or whatever with food and then you could just walk around and eat everyone elses stuff. At first I felt really stupid, but everyone was doing it. The just handed out all of the food they had brought. There were also men singing in circles with guitars and people dancing Sevillanos in their flamenco dresses and everything. It was very interesting.
Over all, Easter was just like a big party rather than anything about Jesus or the resurrection. I went to the big service at the Cathedral. It was at midnight on Saturday and it was really interesting as well. It was a candle light service so everyone had candles and it was super traditional. A good amount of it was in Latin (And I thought it was going to be difficult to understand because it would be in Spanish lol). Nothing about the resurrection was said until the last 15 minutes of the service though and I found that quite odd. That is also when the organ started and that was really neat. In the largest gothic cathedral in the world you can just imagine how it sounded.
PICTURES
The paso of the virgin. This was of the one closest to our house.
This is the Christ figure that was in the same paso. Throughout the week, they kind of tell the Passion story. This was from a paso on Friday.
This is how many people came to Sevilla. It was packed with people. This is a street and you can see the Nazarinos' hats. There were hundreds of them.
Full picture of the Nazarinos
This is all of us at the picnic thing in the pueblo on Easter Sunday. Miguel is on the right with the glasses and Maria Louisa is on the left.
This is what the picnic was like. People all dressed up and on horses. So much fun.
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