“It’s not looking good” — The uncertain future of Spain’s fiestas
Let me paint you a pre-pandemic picture. I am standing in a crowd of over 50,000 sweaty bodies, the sun beating down on me much harder than the giant inflatable beach-balls which are occasionally bouncing over my head, while anticipation and excitement mounts by the minute among the masses. Fire engines are sending jets of water into the air in an attempt to cool us down, aided charitably by some residents of the surrounding buildings who are emptying buckets of water on us from their balconies. Music fills the air, alcohol abounds, and my attention, along with everyone else’s, is fixed upon the site of the imminent theatrics — the church tower. Finally, fireworks shoot up from the roof of the church, and the ‘txupinazo’ begins.
This event marks the beginning of the Fiestas de La Blanca, which are celebrated annually in the northern Spanish city of Vitoria-Gasteiz from the 4th to the 10th of August. Well, usually celebrated; the Covid-19 pandemic saw the Basque city’s celebrations completely cancelled in 2020, and this year, along with most other fiestas throughout Spain, they remain under threat. Such losses have had a marked effect throughout the country, with any plans that had been postponed until 2021 now on edge. The potential consequences? An injured economy, supressed identities, and decreased social cohesion.
Many of the larger and more internationally known fiestas have already announced that they won’t be returning a second year running. Pamplona’s infamous San Fermín festival with its bull runs is one of these, as are the spectacular Las Fallas of Valencia and Seville’s iconic Feria de Abril. The comparatively smaller Vitoria-Gasteiz has not yet decided that this year’s celebrations are definitely off, but the situation is not looking good.
But what, you may be asking, actually is a fiesta? The word itself literally translates to ‘party’ in English, which is fitting considering their general nature today as days-long events of jubilation, dancing, drinking and socialising. But these blanket characteristics are embellished by each and every fiesta’s quirks. Among the weirdest and wackiest traditions, you might include: El Salto del Colacho from the province of Burgos, during which new-born babies are laid down in the street and grown men leap over them like some ceremonial long jump; a goose decapitation day in the town of Lekeitio; or the throwing of a goat off a church roof to kick-start the festivities in a village of Zamora (which, fortunately, is now a plush goat rather than an actual live animal).
And why, you may also be asking, are fiestas such a big deal? Around the globe we have all had to miss out on organised events that are, essentially, characterised by fun, so why are these worth talking about? Many non-Spaniards are familiar with a handful of fiestas that have received much media coverage, such as San Fermín or the Tomatina in Buñol. Yet the spotlighting on the world stage of these tourist traps makes it easy to ignore something vital: that these don’t even tell half the story and that every city, town and village in Spain has its own form of yearly festivities. Fiestas are everywhere and enmeshed within the fabric of local life, not simply experiences to be had in a handful of major cities. With nearly 3,000 celebrated each year around the country and spread over every month of the calendar, it is their pervasiveness, not their spectacle, which is causing such a sense of loss and having such an impact on the people of Spain.
If you were to visit Vitoria-Gasteiz and stand in the crowd at the opening ceremony of their fiestas, which I described, what you witnessed would go something like this: at the signal of the firework, a dummy of a man in traditional Basque dress clinging to an umbrella (a bit like a male Mary Poppins) slowly zip-wires from the church tower at one end of the main square, over the crowd, and into the balcony window of a flat at the opposite end. As if instantly incarnated, a man dressed identically and holding the signature umbrella, emerges from the window, crosses the square on foot through the euphoric crowd back towards the church, and takes his place on a raised platform to lead the tens of thousands of gathered Vitorians in song and chanting. This beret-wearing individual is known as Celedón, named after a character of Basque folklore, and taking on the role is no frivolous matter. Only four men have ever done so since the 1957 addition of this to the historical fiestas, each remaining in his post for years.
Gorka Ortiz de Urbina is the current Celedón. “It’s something very important. It’s a union of all Vitorians, something that represents us all”, he says of the Fiestas de La Blanca. Those six days are an opportunity for citizens to wear their traditional ‘neska’ and ‘blusa’ outfits (for women and men respectively) and the fiestas offer a programme of traditional Basque events such as log chopping and Aurresku dancing (admittedly alongside less ancient diversions like foam fights). The political weight that these expressions of regional identity carry cannot be underestimated considering the Basque Country’s centuries-long tussle with the idea of independence and its history of violent cultural repression by Franco’s dictatorship, making these days a poignant focal point for the population.
Most of Spain’s fiestas have their roots in Catholicism and the celebration of a saint or local ‘virgen’, but these days religion undeniably takes a back seat, even if it is still important to some. The Fiestas de La Blanca of Vitoria-Gasteiz are a fine example of one such traditionally Catholic event that has been sprinkled with eccentric additions to the order of celebration and now exists overwhelmingly as a festival of local rather than religious pride. Pedro García Pilán is an academic at the University of Valencia’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology who explains that, despite the church having lost a lot of its past authority, it is the importance of ritual, even if secularised, which is the driving force behind each fiesta. “Fiestas are basically rituals of identity. Within them we play an emotional game. Communities sacralise things, and in this case, they sacralise an identity through objects, through symbols.”
It is not just such opportunities for expression that are being affected by the calling off of so many fiestas. The economic repercussions of last year’s cancellations has meant that approaching this year with such uncertainty is extremely worrying, and the hospitality industry is the sector that has been hit hardest. “We’re a society that celebrates everything around a table and in bars. That’s how we live,” says Ortiz de Urbina. (Being half Basque, this is something I can absolutely confirm). During fiestas, “you go out, you have lunch, you have dinner with friends. It’s an assumed spend. You say, ‘I’m going to save this for fiestas’”. Many bars he frequents process 20% of their annual revenue during these few days alone, and with a quarter of Vitoria-Gasteiz’s population working in the hospitality sector, the elimination of this fact has been devastating. According to Ortiz de Urbina, the looming possibility of a repeated hit would be like “a sledgehammer” to the economy considering that the industry is already on the back foot from 2020.
Vitoria-Gasteiz is certainly not alone. The hospitality industry is at the core of each fiesta, the only career (barring emergency services) in which people still go to work, the place where the festivities continue after the organised events and where the reflections on the day’s antics occur. In more touristic cities, hotels must be considered; it goes without saying that a significant proportion of San Fermín’s estimated €136 million income comes from foreigners who stay in the city to experience the thrill. However, the scope of the economic impact of a fiesta spans well beyond this, García Pilán explains. Florists that make the beautiful offerings for each local church; bands that play in the town parade; pyrotechnics companies that organise firework displays; artists that repair the religious sculptures before the big day (particularly in Seville’s Easter Semana Santa parades); these are all trades which, not only look forward to their local fiesta as providing their biggest chunk of yearly earnings, but very often live off it financially.
The relatively small port town of Lekeitio hosts Antzar Eguna, a feature of its San Antolín fiestas and potentially one of the most bizarre traditions in that it is the aforementioned event that centres around decapitating geese. Nowadays a freshly-killed goose is used, its body hung upside-down from a rope stretching across the port in a practice that originated from young men attempting to prove their strength and bravery as sailors. Participants row towards the bird, leap from their boats and cling with all they’ve got to its neck as they are thrown up and down by people pulling and relaxing the rope at each end creating a bungee effect. It doesn’t take long for the head to be ripped off by sheer force, and the gnarly affair is watched by thousands gathered around the water. A spokesperson from Lekeitio council tells me that the local commerce, hospitality and tourism sectors are forecasting huge drops in income should the event not go ahead this summer. “It’s clear that Antzar Eguna and the San Antolín fiestas attract many people. The population of Lekeitio doubles, and that helps these businesses work efficiently for the rest of the year.”
Coronavirus is certainly not the first thing to have come along and threatened the Spanish fiesta. Not only did Spain’s three year civil war make it impossible for most to go ahead and produce a death toll to which the COVID figures pale in comparison, but Franco’s regime cracked down hard in the decades that followed on many decadent celebrations. Yet, defiance is woven into the history of fiestas, with a ‘the show must go on’ attitude traditionally prevailing. Cadiz’s February carnival valiantly refused to adhere to the Francoist ban. Lekeitio organisers worked tirelessly with engineers to design a state-of-the-art artificial goose when bird flu suddenly swept thought the avian population in 2006. When in 1976, Vitoria-Gasteiz’s official Celedón refused to lead the festivities in protest of a recent massacre of local workers by armed police, the council managed to pull off the ‘txupinazo’ by finding a last-minute replacement. And Valencia even managed to celebrate Las Fallas at one point during the civil war.
While there is no suggestion of fiestas occurring as normal in the face of a deadly virus, the historical resilience of fiestas speaks to their ability to make it through even the most desperate of times. 2021 is presenting a fresh challenge to their survival, but plans are already afoot in some cities for an adapted version of the festivities to take place. Valencians may not be able to gather in the streets this week to see the giant burning artworks which characterise Las Fallas, but the council has organised virtual events as well as a huge firework display that people can see from their homes. “It’s symbolic necessity. People need ritual. It’s to remind people that we are going to be celebrating together, even if it’s from the balcony,” says García Pilán. As the Fiestas de La Blanca are not for a few months yet, Ortiz de Urbina says that makeshift plans such as these are not being made in Vitoria-Gasteiz. But if they were to be announced soon, he explains that they would be a poor substitute. “Without people it doesn’t make any sense”.
Jesús Prieto Mendaza, an academic at the University of Deusto and a citizen of Vitoria-Gasteiz, does not only believe that fiestas are important, but that they actively play a healing role within society. “Tension, fear, anguish, depression, irascibility, and social discontent already manifest in our streets, workplaces and families,” he says. “The wounds left by the pandemic cannot heal definitively without the necessary help, without the indispensable medication of fiesta.”
To say that fiestas are utopian is not a stretch. Ortiz de Urbina says of his role as the mythical figurehead of the Fiestas de La Blanca: “Joy comes down from the sky and is incarnated”. Those few days out of the year are a rare opportunity to spend time with family and friends and to be unconstrained by the quotidian difficulties of work. There is intergenerational celebration, a feeling of community and pride and, above all, fiestas are synonymous with liberty. The nostalgia generated when it is all over is intense, but you know that it will all return next year. “And that’s what has been lost”, says García Pilán, “that emotional mobilisation of producing fiesta.”
There is a reason this loss of mobilisation is of such importance. Rather than being static events which are simply reproduced each year, it is their repetition that is key. As the published work of García Pilán and his fellow fiestas expert Antonio Ariño lays out, history has shown a process of consolidation and growth of fiestas, both by the recuperation of extinct festivities and the creation of new forms of celebration. Identity is not only expressed but reinforced each year and the fiesta proliferates with each occasion, both retaining tradition and transforming over time… but the year ahead means that this momentum may not be recovered for a while.
Both Lekeitio and Vitoria-Gasteiz are hanging their hopes on Spain’s ramped-up vaccine roll-out. El País reported that 4.8 million doses of the Janssen vaccine are due to arrive in Spain in April, as well as increased deliveries from Moderna and Pfizer. However, the country’s recent pulling of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine amid blood clot scares has set back the government’s plan of having 70% of adults immunised by the summer. “It’s not looking good. People are worried”, says Ortiz de Urbina.
Covid-19 is certainly not a nail in the coffin of the fiesta — it has proved itself to be much too prone to resurrection for this. But the economic and cultural wounds that it the virus is inflicting on it are very significant indeed, and is possible that it will return much changed. “It’s going to be very difficult to celebrate,” says Ortiz de Urbina. “But hey, we’re not losing hope.”
