Feria de Abril - Aprils Fair in Sevilla

Sevilla boasts two of the largest festival celebrations in spain. The first, Semana Santa (Holy Week), always spectacular in Andalucia, is here at its peak with extraordinary processions of masked penitents and lavish floats carried bodily by young men. The second, Feria de Abril, is unique to the city - a one-time market festival, long covererted to a week-long party and drink, food and flamenco. The feria follows hard on the heels of Semana Santa. If you have the Energy, experience both.

Semana Santa:

Semana Santa may be a religious festival, but for most of the week solemnity isn't the keynote - there's lots of carousing and frivolity, and bars are full day and night. In essence, it involves the marching in procession of brotherhoods of the church (cofradias) and penitents, followed by pasos, elaborate platforms or floats on which sit seventeenth-century images of virgin or of Christ depicted in eerily lifelike scenes from the passion. For weeks beforehand, the city's fifty-plus cofradias painstakingly adorn the hundred or so pasos (each brotherhood normally carries two; Christ and a Virgin), spending as much as €350,000 on flowers, costumes, candles, bands and precious stones. The bearers (costaleros, from the padded costal or bag protecting their shoulders) walk in time to stirring traditional dirges and drumbeats from the bands, which are often punctuated by impromptu street-corner seatas - short, fervent, flamenco-style hymns about the Passion and the Virgin's sorrows.

Each procession leaves its district of the city on different day and time during Holy Week and finally ends up joining the official route at La Campana (off Plaza Duque de la Victoria) to proceed along c/Sierpes, through the cathedral and around the Giralda and the Bishop's Palace. Good Friday morning is the climax, when the pasos leave the churches at midnight and move through the town for much of the night. The highlights then are the procession of El Silencio - the oldest cofradia of all, established in 1340 - in total silence, and the arrival at the cathedral of La Esperanza Macarena, an image of the patron Virgin of bullfighters, and the extension of Sevilla itself.

The pattern of events changes every day, and while newsstands stock the official program - Programa de Semana Santa - they quickly sell out. A daily detailed timetable is issued with local papers (El correo and Diario de Sevilla both do coloured route maps) and is essential if you want to know which processions are where. the ultra-CatholicABC paper has the best background information, and the Tourism's El Giraldillo listings magazine prints a brief program, while the banks paper also puts out an excellent pocket guide with all the routes and cofradias tunics listed in colour, and is available from newsstands. A dedicated web site www.lapassion.net, also has lots of background information and links.

On Maundy Thursday women dress in black and it's considered respectful for tourists not to dress in shorts or T-shirts. Triana is a good place to be on this day when, in early afternoon, Las Cigarreras (the cofradia attached to the chapel of the new tobacco factory) starts out for the cathedral with much gitano enthusiasm, its band playing marches in flamenco rhythm.

To see the climax of all the processions, save that of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, there's always a crush of spectators outside the cathedral and along c/Sierpes, the most awe-inspiring venue. However, without a seat invitation or to share someone's balcony, viewing spots near the cathedral are almost impossible to find. As most of the crowd wants to see the processions where they exit into Plaza de la Virgen de los Reyes, but even here it gets chaotic. The best way of all to see the processions is to pick them up on the way from and to their barrios. And here you'll see the teatro de la calle - theatre of the streets.

semana santa in seville, Spain