Semana Santa

Sorry for waiting so long to blog again! Once again, I said it wouldn’t be long, and it was. Well, this is the blog for Semana Santa. I’ll blog about Morocco really soon. Anyway, here we go.

La Semana Santa means “Holy Week”. As you probably know, Spain is a non-institutionalized Catholic region. They, in their history, were institutionalized, but now they have religious freedom. Because of this history, basically every piece of history and every tradition is connected to Catholicism. Semana Santa began something like 500 years ago. What Semana Santa is is each church has their own “paso” (float) or “Virgen” (Virgin Mary on a float) and sometimes both. Actually, some churches have several. Each paso or virgin (just call them both pasos) has its own route, time, and length. With each paso walks the “nazarenos” which translates to Nazarenes. These are the men (and more recently, women) that are wearing the garb akin to the Ku Klux Klan. The nazarenos’ uniforms are based upon the Spanish Inquisition outfits. The KKK then used these uniforms as their uniforms. The two are completely disconnected. Here is a picture of the nazarenos I’ve just described.

So anyway, that is La Semana Santa in a nutshell. I had the ones I wanted to see, as did my friend Becky. We hit the road on Sunday and, after moving through the 100 gazillion people Spaniards, got to see a paso that’s called “La Borriquita” at the Iglesia del San Salvador (San Salvador Church). Here’s a picture of that paso. Throughout that day, we saw La Estrella (The Star) too. My old host brother, Bartolomé, was in that one as a nazareno. Throughout the week, we saw La Macarena and a couple other ones. Sometimes I didn’t even know what we were looking at. Haha, that’s just how it was.

  

Overall, I didn’t love Semana Santa. It was really cool getting to see the pasos because they were GORGEOUS. But, there were so many people it was almost hard to enjoy. You had to try to make it through all the people all over the city and then spend about 3 hours standing through the whole process of 1 paso. The floats themselves took about 1 ½ hours, but you had to get there so early to stand to have a good spot. I’d give Semana Santa a 4 out of 10 if I were scoring it. But hey, chalk it up to yet another experience! Below are a couple of pictures.

La Borriquita

La Estrella

La Macarena (this is one of the most famous statues in Sevilla, it's a Mary that is crying and her face is on postcards, shirts, etc.)

I really am not sure what this one is because it was one that I just happened to run into and couldn't get past until it passed so I could cross the road.