Semana Santa, the week from Palm Sunday to Easter, is much more than a religious occasion in Spain: it is a great collective event involving believers and non-believers alike, declared of international tourist interest in many cities. Each city has its own style, but everywhere the protagonists are the brotherhoods (cofradías or hermandades), associations of the faithful who look after the sacred images during the year and carry them in procession.
Nazarenos, pasos and costaleros
Brotherhood members walk dressed as nazarenos, in a tunic and tall pointed hood (capirote) that covers the face, as a sign of anonymous penance; the colour varies from one brotherhood to another. The statues are carried on great processional floats, the pasos, showing scenes of the Passion or the grieving Virgin under a canopy, lit by hundreds of candles. Many are masterpieces of seventeenth-century polychrome sculpture. In Andalusia the pasos, which can weigh over a tonne, are carried by dozens of costaleros hidden beneath the float, guided by the voice of the capataz; elsewhere they are carried on the shoulders outside or on wheels. As they pass, someone on a balcony may sing a saeta, a spontaneous flamenco song addressed to the statue.
The cities
- Seville: the most famous and spectacular, with about seventy brotherhoods processing to the cathedral. The climax is the Madrugá, the night between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, when the Macarena and the Gran Poder come out.
- Málaga: huge thrones carried by hundreds of men, bands and, on Maundy Thursday, the Spanish Legion carrying the Cristo de la Buena Muerte while singing its anthem.
- Granada: processions against the backdrop of the Alhambra and the climb of the Cristo de los Gitanos to Sacromonte.
- Valladolid: the Holy Week of great Castilian sculpture, with Gregorio Fernández's pasos, and the general procession on Good Friday.
- Zamora: austere and silent, with night processions through the Romanesque centre, among the oldest in Spain.
- Cuenca, with its noisy turbas, and Cartagena and Lorca, in the Murcia region, with colourful processions and the biblical parades of the pasos blancos and azules.
- In Aragon, at Calanda, Alcañiz and Híjar, the Rompida de la Hora: at midnight on Maundy Thursday thousands of drums start playing together and do not stop for hours (see Luis Buñuel).
Practical tips
The dates change every year with Easter. Hotels in the main cities should be booked well ahead, and prices rise. Routes and times of processions are published by town halls and brotherhood councils, often in apps too. For a good view, arrive early and choose narrow streets and corners, where the manoeuvres of the pasos are most moving. Rain can lead to processions being cancelled. In many regions Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are public holidays. See also Spanish festivals.