The Burial of the Sardine

One thing you have to get used to when living in Spain is the Fiesta. The Spanish are probably the fiesta people of the world. They love their fiestas and spend a lot of time preparing for them. In Spain you buy a special calendar and there are so called 'Red Days' on the calendar - which are national Fiestas (for example the Day of the Constitution). These are compulsory and most businesses have to shut for those days. In my line of business, home care and nursing, we are allowed to carry on working, because patients need to still receive their care and have breakfast etc. The only other business that will always be open on Fiesta days (except Christmas day) are the bakers. The Spanish generally do no store bread, they buy it fresh every day, and by law bakers have to provide bread each day of the year apart from Christmas day.

Apart from the Red Days there are local fiestas, depending on which Saint covers your village or town. Also there is Semana Santa (starts Thursday before Easter and finishes Monday after) when the banks are shut and some supermarkets open for limited hours to let people restock on necessities. All other shops tend to be shut. Christmas is of course also celebrated here, but not nearly as important here as Easter.

Of course the Spanish also have Carnaval, which is for the three days leading up to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent (40 days leading up to Easter). Depending on where you live, Carnaval can be a large affair (Benidorm, Alicante) or small (our village and surrounding villages). People dress up and party. Carnaval is a very very old tradition and there are records of Carnaval being celebrated in the Middle Ages. Then is appears it had something to do with using up all the old stock of flour, milk, butter etc. before Lent started (same applies in UK when they have Shrove Tuesday and use up their provisions for making pancakes).

One of the nice points of Carnaval comes at the very end, with the Burial of the Sardine. In Alicante this takes place at the beach - with the ritual burial of carnaval masks in the sand. In some other places a woman is chosen to be the Lady of the Sardine and the sardine is marched in ritual procession through the streets of the town. The sardine is then set on fire and the ashes are buried. This is supposed to mark the end of Carnaval. The Spanish painter Goya painted a beautiful painting of revellers which is known as The Burial of the Sardine.

I find the ritual of the burial of the sardine very interesting. Although it is meant to be part of Carnaval, and an essentially Christian ceremony marking the end of festivities and the beginning of the sombre period of Lent, I think it may go back much further than Christianity and be a ritual that actually was a bit like the ritual drawing of animals in order to capture them or the ritual slaughter of a young animal in order to placate the gods and provide a good lambing season or whatever the animal was that was slaughtered. Could this not be a ritual by fishermen to increase their catch? I have not found any evidence of this yet, but am looking through old documents now and will let you know if and when I find something. Whatever the truth, it is a very interesting ritual and well worth a trip to Spain.