All about the island of La Palma, in the Canaries.
Current Weather
Sunday, 25 May 2008
Corpus Christi in San Jose
Like a lot of places, San José in Breña Baja celebrates Corpus Christi (the body of Christ) on the Sunday ten weeks after Easter Sunday. Traditionally, they make carpets out of coloured salt, like this one from 2006. (You can see more at http://sheilacrosby.com/fiestas.php .)
Corpus Christi (the body of Christ) is a big festival in Mazo. They decorate the streets with spectacular archways and carpets covered with flowers and seeds.
The main feast day is ten weeks after Maundy Thursday, so this year it's very early. (In 2009 it will be on the 11th of June).
People collect the materials and work on the pieces pretty much all year, but it all comes together on a Wednesday night, so Thursday morning is the best time to see the archways.
If you can't see them then, they stay up until Sunday. The church of San Blas, at the bottom of the hill, gets decorated too. It's a rather unusual church in that it has three naves.
And the flowers inside are wonderful. If you get there, check out the ceiling over the altar, too.
This is the 50th anniversary of the fiesta in its current form.
The carpets beneath the archways are made using things rather like wrought iron gates, as stencils. They lay the "gate" down on the sand, fill the sections with petals or whatever, squirt with water-with-a-bit-of-glue-in-it, and lift the gate up again.
And to the best of my knowledge, the first place in Spain to have an official Mother's Day was Breña Baja. The local poet, Félix Duarte Pérez , left home for Venezuela at some horrendously young age (fifteen, I think). Not surprisingly, he missed his mother a good deal, and they sent each other lots of letters. When he finally came home at the age of 35, he persuaded the town hall to adopt the "American" idea of Mother's Day.
They decided to celebrate it on the first Sunday in May. And in Breña Baja, people traditionally wear flowers. If your mother's still alive, you wear a red one, and if she's died, you wear a white on.
I was a little slow getting out to see the crosses this year, but I was glad I made the effort. The traditional crosses were much the same as last year (see http://sheilacrosby.com/fiestas/cruz.php ). But one street in Santa Cruz absolutely delighted me.
Wedding breakfast
For the last few years, it's been fairly common to have a few mayos or machangos beside the cross. These are giant rag dolls, something like scarecrows or the guys I used to make for bonfire night.
More wedding guests
Well this street in Santa Cruz was full of them. The display just went on and on. I tried to count them, but I got lost somewhere after 200.
More wedding guests
At the bottom end they, had a 1960s wedding, with bride, groom, and lots of guests.
The bride's mother perhaps?
More wedding guests
Further on, they had people picnicking at the Las Nieves Fiesta.
The picnic
I think he's hungry, don't you?
Including one man who had clearly overdone it.
And he was thirsty earlier on
Higher up there was a protest march.
The protest march.
With people watching it.
Watching the march, with the nibbles to hand
Higher up still, I found people fishing in the street. Hope they got a good catch.
San Jose has a ruined manor house, dating from something like the C16th. I don't know the building's history, but the island has lots of old manor houses left from the days when sugar cane made the island was rich. I've always dreamed of one day being filthy rich enough to buy it and restore it, because it must have been gorgeous once. It's no bigger than my modern house, but it had carved balconies and wooden ceilings.
For some time it's been empty and far too dilapidated to live in. I heard that the owners couldn't get planning permission to fix it, so it slowly decayed while they argued with the bureaucrats. I found that rather sad.
And this evening it caught fire. The roof beams were tea - resin-filled heartwood from the Canary Pine. It doesn't catch fire easily, but once it gets going, there's no stopping it. It also burns with a distinctive smell, clearly noticable even from my house at the other end of the village.
So I imagine that's pretty much the end of that. I can't see anyone restoring it now. So that's a bit more of the village's heritage gone.
Artefuego glassblowing studio is at the back of Plaza Sotomayor, where they hold the Argual flea market every Sunday. It's a good idea to combine the two, because they hold public demonstrations on Sundays between 10 am and 2 pm. They combine fragments of lava into their creations, and to the best of their knowledge, they're the only people in the world to do so. This makes every piece unique.
The workshop is open every day except Thursdays, from 10 am to 2 pm.
They do ask you please not to bring rucksacks, pushchairs or dogs into the shop. Just think of a Great Dane puppy having fun with all those shelves crammed with fragile ornaments!
The 23rd of April is world book day, because it's the anniversary of the birth and death of William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes (author of "Don Quijote"), the death of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Josep Pla, the birth of Maurice Druon, Vladimir Nabokov, Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Halldór Laxness.
Actually Shakespeare died ten days after Cervantes, both on April 23rd.
How come? At the time, England used the Julian calendar, and Spain used the Gregorian one.
In Santa Cruz de la Palma, they set up bookstalls along the Calle Real. Many of them give a 10% discount. Now for me, this is frustrating. I drool over bookshops the way some of my girlfriends flip for shoe shops, but reading Spanish is slow, hard going. But one of the stalls has a few books in English.
And they'll be there all week.
I can just see myself succumbing to the lure of another book, the way I do to "just one more chocolate..." If you want to get there before me, you'd better hurry.
La Palma has a talented new digital artist called Helen Bennett. A year ago she left her high-stress job in London and moved to Franceses, in Garafía, with her partner. They bought a fixer-upper and set about fixing it up. Of course this wasn't always smooth going - you can read their adventures at http://casa-estrellas.blogspot.com
Last night the Chamber Orchestra of Breña Baja gave a concert in Cancajos. It was rather windy, so they moved it to just outside the tourist office. I didn't hear all of it, but they seemed pretty good to me.
At 18:30 in Cancajos, there will be a concert by the Chamber orchestra of Breña Baja at the ampitheatre on the promenade. (Start at the main beach and head a few hundred yards south towards the old salt works and the airport. It's small, but you'll know it when you see it.) This is in the open air, so it may be canceled if the weather's bad.
At 20:00 in the theatre classroom (aula municipal de teatro) in Tijarafe, a musical theatre production (in Spanish) of "El cabaret del Capitán Varela".
At 21:00 at Rocke's bar in Anselmo Perez Brito street, Santa Cruz de la Palma there's the launch party for issue five of Ruido, the local fanzine. Two local groups will perform live: "Suzy Rodríguez y Pedro León" and "No Rula".
This is Aladin. to my amazement, he said he'd only been practising with the glass ball for about a year, although sometimes for hours at a time. He's from Poland originally, but now he lives in Tenerife because he's in love with the golden Fairy.
There were a couple of other living statues that did a better job of staying immobile (in my opinion) but were less interesting when they came to life.
And then there was the alien. He had a set of scary teeth, but unfortunately I didn't manage to capture them on film.
And the sailor was very cool, too.
This is the third year they've held this competition, and it seems to be getting more popular each year. So there's every chance there'll be another next year, which is fine by me.
This morning, Santa Cruz played host to a competition for living statues.If you haven't seen these before. they stand completely still until you put some money in the container, and then they perform.
I've seen a few before, but this competition brought in 16 artists from all over Europe and beyond.
They'll be back tomorrow and Saturday, from 11 am to 2 pm. And I'll get some video up tomorrow.
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Furl It
Newsvine
StumbleUpon
