A Spectacular Spanish Soiree
It is said that more than 5,000 fairs and fiestas are celebrated annually in Spain. Seville’s April Fair, one of the largest and most colourful of these, makes for the perfect introduction to this truly Spanish phenomenon. What originally started as a cattle fair has now become a week long marathon of eating, sherry drinking and flamenco dancing in Seville’s fairgrounds, Los Remedios.
It’s six o’clock in the evening on the fifth day of the April Fair of Seville, and people have already had four nights of eating, drinking and dancing until the small hours. They are still going strong and now Los Remedios are once again filled with people, horses and carriages.
The air smells of horse manure. Hooves clatter against the street stones. Rhythmic flamenco music flows out of the casetas, the large tents which line the streets. The women wear frilly flamenco dresses, shawls and large, brightly coloured earrings. The sand covering the wide sidewalks is the same lion-yellow colour as in the bull rings, and thousands of red and white paper lanterns hang in long rows above the streets. Later on, when it gets dark, they will all be lit.
Horse drawn carriages and elegant, mounted Andalusian horses form long, tight rows. Horses pass by carrying young women sitting side-saddle with one arm around the waist of a rider and their flamenco dresses draped over the horses’ hindquarters. The riders wear boots, striped trousers, short jackets and vests, and, to top it all off, flat, saucer-brimmed hats.
The drivers of the horse drawn carriages wear colourful red, green or yellow satin jackets as well as pirate-style handkerchiefs underneath their hats. This is pure and uninhibited exhibitionism. And nobody seems to mind being photographed. In fact, to be pointed at with a long telephoto lens is taken as a compliment. Even the horses are posing. Manes and tails braided, they walk elegantly, lifting their hooves high above the ground.
Many fiestas have religious origins and feature processions and acts of penitence. But the April Fair of Seville started as a cattle fair. The traders lived in tents on the fairgrounds. As time went on, more and more stands were erected beside the tents, entertainers came to perform their acts, and dances were organised inside the tents.
Eventually, there were more people coming to the fair to have a good time than to trade cattle. Today, the annual April Fair of Seville is one of Spain’s largest and most colourful celebrations, attracting hordes of visitors, not only from other parts of Spain but from many other countries around the world.
Los Remedios is set aside for the festival. It is a checker board of streets, 5 km long, that stands empty for most of the year, just waiting to open its gates to the one million party-hungry Spaniards and foreigners who gather here during the festival week, which is celebrated two weeks after Easter. Then about 1,100 large, striped, rectangular caseta tents are erected along the streets. Here, people sit at tables, eating and drinking, or are up on their feet, swirling away in the fiery movements of the flamenco dance or, more often, in the “Sevillena”, the local version of flamenco.
Each of the casetas is owned by a company or organisation and the list of groups wanting to erect a new caseta on the fairgrounds is long. You cannot enter a caseta unless you have been invited or belong to the group who owns it. There are guards standing outside every caseta to block gatecrashers, but the locals have made a sport of overcoming such obstacles. There is even a special word, “encaramarse”, for joining a group with the sole purpose of being invited to a caseta.
Another trick which Fernando, the young man at the information centre, shares with us, is to pretend that you are looking for someone in the caseta and then stay on to enjoy the party. He himself did not get back home until five in the morning, and then only got three hours of sleep before it was time to get up and go to work. “Surely you can see that,” he says, pointing at his eyes. But he looks surprisingly lively. How do they manage it, these Spaniards?
But you do not necessarily have to go to a caseta to dance. There is music everywhere and we constantly run into dancing groups formed spontaneously on the wide, sand-covered sidewalks. A group of middle-aged women get inspired when they see my camera and one of them lifts her whirling skirt so high that she briefly reveals her thighs and knickers. “They should see me at home in my village now!” she shouts while the others roar with laughter.
There are also six public casetas, owned by the city of Seville, which are open to everybody. We stop by one of them, make our way to the bar and order a fino, a glass of dry, white sherry which is the special drink of the April Fair. Inside the crowded caseta the music is loud. There is very little space left and close to the bar pairs of young women are dancing, interlocked in the formal turns of the Sevillena. The flamenco and the Sevillena are proud, postured dances, performed with a straight back and head and arms held high.
The day before, we had gone to see the bullfights in the Maestranza, Spain’s oldest bullfighting ring. There are bullfights every day of the fair and we chose one featuring some of Spain’s biggest stars, among them the teenage phenomenon El Juli.
Bullfighting is not a sport, but rather a sort of theatrical play, an acted drama. The important difference is that the leading actor actually risks his life. Much of the appeal is created by the colours: the dark bull against the yellow sand; the shocking pink capes of the matador’s helpers with which they manoeuvre the bull into position; and then the matador himself, dressed in a tight-fitting, glittering costume, a Mickey Mouse hat and a pair of pink socks. He makes turn after turn with his blood coloured muleta (cape) before he finishes the drama by thrusting his sword between the shoulder blades of the bull. If he is skilled enough, he will be able to do it in a single, clean, lethal stroke.
Considering his improbable clothes, you would expect the matador to strike a somewhat ridiculous figure. But out there in the arena, in his elegant dance with the bull, he is far from ridiculous, and his movements strongly resemble those of the flamenco dancer.
The Spaniards really know how to party; eating, drinking and dancing until the early hours of the morning. They certainly love their fairs and festivals, and the April Fair in Seville is only one of the many that scream out to be explored and enjoyed.
Story & Pix © Anders Ryman/TCS
