Although Andalusia proudly bears the title the Land of Mary the Most Holy, in honor of the Marian focus of popular religion there, that fabled region of southern Spain might with equal justice be called the Land of Celebrations. In a landmark compilation of information on Andalusia's fiestas, or festivals and rituals, Salvador Rodriguez (1982) has organized accounts of over three thousand celebrations in eight hundred of the cities, towns, and villages where some 6.5 million Andalusians live.
Not only are fiestas ubiquitous features of the Andalusian calendar and landscape, they are also well attended. The grandest of them--like the Holy Week processions, April Fair of Seville, or the annual pilgrimage to La Virgen del Rocio (the Virgin of the Dew)--attract millions of Andalusians and tourists. Even local public ceremonies are attended each year by increasing numbers of participants and spectators, as the region enjoys a celebratory boom.
Yet numbers alone, however impressive, do not convey adequately the social and cultural importance of fiestas in Andalusia. Andalusians take their fiestas seriously, if not solemnly, and any complete account of their culture must of necessity include a careful consideration of these festivals.
Regrettably many observers, even some very eminent ones like the philosopher Ortega y Gasset, have trivialized the underlying significance of the Andalusian passion for the fiesta, either by summarily dismissing it as frivolous or by using it to buttress tried stereotypes of regional character. Fortunately, the recent work of ethnographers such as Encarnacion Aguilar (1983), Stanely Brandes (1980), Josep Maria Comelles (1984), David Gilmore (1975), Isidoro Moreno (1985), and the aforementioned Salvador Rodriguez has demonstrated clearly that many insights into Andalusian society, culture, and psychology are to be gained from the serious study of the region's traditional festivities--Holy Week rituals, Carnaval, May Crosses, pilgrimages, fairs, patron saint feasts, and the like.
Festivals of Almonte
Almonte, a town of only 14,500 residents located in the southern cone of the province of Huelva, enjoys a particularly vivid reputation for its enthusiasm about festivals. The fame of Almonte's people is founded upon their single-minded devotion to their immensely popular patroness, La Virgen del Rocio, a beautiful gothic statue of the Virgin Mary. The Almontenos exert a jealous, some critics say fanatical, devotion to the rituals associated with the veneration of this advocation of the Mother of God. Hosts to Andalusia's grandest and most joyful pilgrimage, they maintain their symbol with implacable determination.
Participation in the yearly pilgrimage to Rocio's shrine, located within the municipal boundaries of Almonte, some fifteen kilometers distant from the town itself, has skyrocketed from a mere five thousand at the turn of the century to well over a million participants and spectators in 1986. As the scale of the cult of Rocio has increased, its social organization has undergone significant transformation.
At the beginning of this century, devotion to the Virgin of the Dew was organized around the hermandad matriz (principal brotherhood) at Almonte as well as hermandades filiales (nine
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