Last week was Corpus, a big party with religious overtones, though once upon a time, it was the other way around.
There’s still a solemn procession through the streets accompanied by a youth orchestra who play dirgelike music but the processions have generally merged with
the annual féria.
A little bit of history: the
Catholic kings used this holiday to Christianize the population which had been
under Muslim rule for eight centuries. According to some accounts,
they instructed the town hall to invest a lot of money in the
fiesta and urged the people to celebrate until they “appeared crazy,” hence all the gold and silver ...
Here’s what part of it looked like where I live:
Wow - what kind of trees are those?
ReplyDeleteI've asked my neighbors, but no one seems to have a name for them. Amazing, no? I also looked it up on google images, but -- nothing.
ReplyDeleteThe definitive answer, after many suggestions from neighbors and even one gardener that it might be a weeping willow (sauce llorón) which it is definitely not, is Retama, and apparently there are lots of them along the Nile River in Egypt.
ReplyDelete