In southern Spain, a pilgrimage and party
FOR someone who is not remotely religious, the moment was almost surreal. Standing by a hillside stream in the Sierra Morena mountains of southern Spain, I was face to face with the wife of the mayor of a nearby town, and she was baptising me.
She scooped water into her hand, asked me to lean over and dribbled it into my hair. “With this water we baptise you in the Stream of the Rooster, witness to your first journey,” the woman, Cabe Tébar Gil, said with a smile. Then, draping a small medallion on a ribbon around my neck, she declared me a pilgrim. With that, she kissed me on both cheeks and sent me on my way, with applause from the gathered crowd.
Although raised as a Roman Catholic, in Spain’s Basque Country, I had long since abandoned any connection to the church. And yet I did not need much persuading when a friend suggested that I join him for a trek – alongside thousands of other people – to the mountaintop basilica that holds the shrine of Our Lady of the Cabeza. Some 32 kilometres north of Andújar in the province of Jaén, the site was where, in 1227, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a shepherd and healed his afflictions.
I was promised the trip would be a vivid assemblage of ritual and pageantry in the manner of old Spain, full of style and accompanied by all manner of festivities.
“It’s all about joy,” Isabel Uceda Cantero, the mayor of Lopera, a town southwest of Andújar, said over drinks the night before the romería, adding, “People here cry with joy.”
That same evening, my friend Francisco Senra – everyone calls him Fran – and I walked for blocks in Andújar through an enormous street fair, an event that always precedes the romería. People had set up elaborate picnics on tables, rows and rows of them, and offered friends and strangers whatever they had. Toasts rang through the air, and, at the slightest provocation, regal, beautifully attired flamenco dancers broke out in the middle of the street.
Mixed with the sounds of strumming guitars and palmas – the rhythmic clapping of flamenco – was the clopping of hoofs. The horses were in festive finery and obedient to every subtle command from perfect-posture riders whose stiff-brimmed Cordobés hats complemented their highwaisted paseo trousers, short jackets – chaquetillas camperas – and tall leather boots.
During the street fair, Fran introduced me to everyone he knew, and to some he didn’t, and we were plied with refreshments, including wine, beer, and gin and tonics, and tapas. This went on for hours. “You don’t sleep during the romería,” said José Parrado, the owner of Los Naranjos, a bar and restaurant on Calle Guadalupe, who has done the pilgrimage for almost all of his 60 years. “Maybe you can rest your brain a little. Maybe.”
The civil war did not spare the ancient effigy of Our Lady of the Cabeza, whose 16thcentury mountaintop sanctuary was reduced to rubble in 1936 when Republican forces laid siege to Franco loyalists who had taken refuge there. It was subsequently rebuilt, and a new effigy was created in 1944. The small wooden figure, wearing a crown, clad in resplendent vestments and holding a representation of the baby Jesus, is venerated as a saint and is considered by many pilgrims to be capable of healing the sick and performing other miracles.
“For those who venerate this Virgin, she’s the only one there is; she’s the mother of God,” said Manuel Andres Jiménez Crespo, an architect who lives in Andújar. “The others don’t count. For the devout, they have to believe that.”
As we headed into the hills, Araceli González Rubia, a former leader of the Cofradía Matriz de la Virgen de la Cabeza, the organising entity of the pilgrimage, struck a similar note. “We pray for those who don’t know how to, and when we get to the top, we thank her,” she said. “And when we have to go, we become sad because we have to leave her behind. I even see her as sad.”
As González Rubia spoke, thousands of people around us were making their way along winding, forested roads and dirt paths on foot, on horseback, in cars and aboard long wagons pulled by tractors.
After travelling part of the route with Fran in a sport utility vehicle, I was to ride the rest of the way in one of the wagons, known as carretas. Having reached my assigned wagon, I joined a party in progress, with a dance floor in the middle, flamenco music blaring from speakers and drinks on ice. There were at least 15 people aboard, most of them in their 20s and dancing with abandon as the wagon rattled up the mountain path.
“Anyone who tells you they’re here only to express their devotion, they’re not being truthful,” said Miguel Cano Villar, the owner of the wagon and of a restaurant in Andújar called El Puchero. “Yes, there are some, but look at these kids. They’re here to have a good time.”
Once we got to the top of the mountain, it became clear how vast the crowd was, as many as half a million, according to the local police department.
The following morning, an open-air Mass next to the sanctuary preceded what I had been told would be the most dramatic moment of the weekend: a procession through the village by the effigy of Our Lady of the Cabeza, carried aloft on a platform by dozens of heaving men. As the cortège slowly wound its way through the streets amid the milling throngs, pilgrims passed their babies to a pair of priests riding on the platform to have the infants blessed by the Virgin. Disabled people in wheelchairs were lifted too, their hands reaching out to the passing holy figure.
The invocations were relentless: “Viva la Virgen de la Cabeza!”