Linda Hall – Pagan Spain II

SPAIN’S biggest celebrations often coincide – not entirely by chance – with a solstice or equinox. 

Valencia’s Fallas are ostensibly burnt in honour of San Jose whose feast-day falls on March 19 near the spring equinox.  In Alicante city you have Hogueras on June 24, San Juan’s day, and midsummer as near as dammit, so there is a pagan pedigree too.

Bonfires were always lit in the city and the surrounding countryside on June 24 when pieces of wood and anything that no longer served a useful purpose went up in flames.

Hogueras only left their humble beginnings behind and entered the big time in the 1920s, when Alicante businessmen decided to upgrade them into a Fallas rival.

Meanwhile San Juan bonfires were always lit throughout Spain, often on beaches but also where you wouldn’t expect to find them.

That happened in the small square where I live in inland Valencia province when San Juan fell on a Saturday, a working day for me but nobody else.

The jollity began mid-morning as people ate and drank their way through industrial quantities of food and alcohol, accompanied by the usual thumping music until late.

It was the last straw when they started hammering away at something and I could hear them breaking up what sounded like wooden pallets.

The shutters were halfway closed and I couldn’t be bothered to investigate even though there was a great deal of shouting.  I had been subjected to shouting all day, since silence is a vacuum that people in this part of Spain feel obliged to fill, and it was pointless to look for its source.

That was when I heard a dulzaina, a kind of recorder, and glimpsed a flicker of flames through the shutters.  Opening them I saw my neighbours walking with linked hands round a small bonfire.

And yes, some of the younger men did jump over the flames, although at its outer edge, not the centre.  Nothing organised, nothing bigtime, just pagan and Christian Spain together.