Sevilla Photos

After sorting through 347 photos, I have finally put up my photos from Sevilla online. The photos of various historical sites can be seen here; the photos from feria can be seen here.

A few things about feria:

Feria is an enormous festival that people in Sevilla organize every year in the two weeks following Semana Santa, which I described in this post. The fair was first held in 1847 when several prominent families decided to have a fair to exhibit their livestock and quickly became a full fledged festival celebrating Spring. Since then, the fair continued to be a center point in the spring festivities in the city, even during the Spanish civil war and the complex transition to democracy after Franco's death.

The fair has a set of formalities that organize its schedules. The first Sunday of the week long party opens up with the lighting of the enormous gate that allows visitors into the fair grounds with streets lined with casetas, large private and public tents where individuals congregate to eat, drink, and dance sevillanas, a form of flamenco dancing, to live or recorded flamenco music; an area with carnival rides flanks the southern side of the casetas.

The next day, the casetas host a formal dinner where women wear brightly colored flamenco dresses while mend attend the ceremony in their Sunday finest, usually a suit with a shirt and tie ensemble that matches his partner's dress. After that Monday, the fair grounds erupt into an enormous party that refuses to let up until the early hours of the morning.

One of the interesting aspects of the fair is the accessibility of casetas. NGOs, labor unions, and neighborhood tents are completely open to the public; you simply need to walk in to enjoy the festivities. Other tents are private and will only let in certain individuals and groups based on a family or business connection. I entered both types of tents during my time in Sevilla, mostly on the basis of my initiative to find labor union casetas or through friends of my Fulbright companions who lived in the city. Despite the restrictions that exist in the accessibility of these tents, I felt that both types of casetas were equally enjoyable (and more than happy to provide its guests with cheap alcohol).

Now, other cities host similar festivals. Valencia has las fallas, a festival where neighborhoods and NGOS build enormous floats that the party goers set ablaze after displaying them throughout the city for a week in March; Cordoba has las cruzes, a smaller, more public version of Sevilla's feria in May; and Madrid has San Isidora, a feria-type festival with a large number of free musical and theater performances held throughout the city in May. Sevilla's feria, however, is the most famous and perhaps the most prominent (and breathtaking) display of traditional Spanish Andalusian culture in the country.