From Palm Sunday until Easter Sunday, the whole of Spain fervently commemorates the Passion of Jesus Christ. But no where do candles more completely banish night, nowhere does incense hang so heavily in the air, nowhere are the processions longer or more magnificent than in Seville, the home of the tireless, if legendary, sinner Don Juan. From the Sunday which celebrates Jesus' entry into Jerusalem to the Sunday which remembers His resurrection, Sevillians of every station abandon any of committing the great and notorious sins that might obsess them during the rest of the year, and give themselves up to a crescendo of anonymous, penitential humility that draws visitors from many far places. 

     When dusk has fallen on Palm Sunday, the first pasos, or life-sized and realistically painted wooden images on large wooden floats are taken from their shrines in the local parish churches and readied for their annual procession to the cathedral and back again. They belong to one of forty-eight cofradias, or  brotherhoods, which in the Middle Ages were the charitable-religious parallels of the trade guilds. Each brotherhood has at least two pasos one representing a scene from the Passion, the other a sorrowing Virgin. Both are loaded with flowers and lit by 5 of candles in silver holders. But only the Virgin is festooned with necklaces and bracelets lent, without receipt or insurance, by members of the brotherhood. The Virgin's mantle is the chief pride of the brotherhood, embroidered as it is with gold and encrusted with jewels-a labor of nearly two years. The pasos are home on the backs of thirty or more stevedores of matching height, who sweat, invisible, under a velvet valance as they shuffle through the streets to the slow beat of a drum. The float is accompanied by men dressed as Roman soldiers in memory of Jesus' guard enroute to Calvary. Marching too are the penitents of the cofradia, hooded, masked, robed to the ground, many carrying lighted tapers, others bent under crude, heavy crosses made of saplings, some in sackcloth, others in satin, some barefoot, others shod. 

     In the 17th century, the best Andalusian sculptors were set to work carving many of the pasos which are carried today. Since then, some of the images have come to be venerated more than others. The most famous is La Macarena, the Virgin of Hope, which belongs to the brotherhood of bullfighters and gypsies. On her left cheek she still bears the scar of a wineglass thrown by an onlooker in a drunken ecstasy. For his deed, he walked in chains among the penitents for eight consecutive Holy Weeks. Another favorite is the paso of Cristo de la Expiracidn, or Christ Expiring, but better known as El Cachorro, the name of a popular gypsy blacksmith killed in a duel years ago. The woodcarver, passing as the gypsy expired in the street, used his features as a model for the face of Christ. 

     The nightly processions follow a prescribed route through the Plaza de la Campana, once the urban center of Seville, along the narrow Calle de las Sierpes, the Street of the Serpents, past a reviewing stand in the Plaza de Ia Falange Espanola, and into the west portal of the second largest Christian church in the world (after St. Peter's in Rome). The procession files out by a door flanking the Giralda, a Moorish campanile which alone survives the vast mosque on whose ground the cathedral was built in the 14th century. Nearly twelve hours after it leaves its parish church, the paso is returned by its human engine. 

     As the week progresses, more and more floats file through the streets. On Thursday and Friday, Seville is closed to automobile traffic, and the sound of church bells tolling the hours is replaced by the rasp of an enormous rattle suspended high in the Giralda. But if some sounds are stilled in mourning for the Crucifixion, others, more fitting, replace them. Increasingly, the streets echo the tremulous, high-pitched wail of the saeta, a brief "arrow" of song improvised by the ecstatic spectator in anguished tribute to a paso swaying by. Only heard in Andalusia and only during Holy Week, a saeta halts the procession and, as it dies away, leaves a silence broken only by the plaintive sigh of the bearers begging for water. 

On Saturday morning, the purple hanging which has veiled the main altar of the cathedral since the beginning of Lent is parted, the 800-pound paschal candle is lit, bells toll in every church, and the town kneels in prayer. 
Pontifical High Mass on Easter morning is finished by noon to make way for the afternoon bullfight. Now that Don Juan's sins have been expiated for another year, no Sevillian can fail to remember that his city's bulls are among the most ferocious in Spain. 

Source: "Holy Week in Seville" by Alfred Mayor, Holiday, v. 37 (April 1965), pp.80, 84. 
 

The procession and the saeta  

     The largest moment of the Holy Year is Holy Week in Seville. The whole town is decked out like a theater. Upper windows on all the processional streets are at a premium, festooned with colored cloth, shawls, palm branches from Elche (the only date- palm plantation left in Europe). By this time of year, the air is heavy with the scent of orange blossom, thick with it, and the thicker for a mixing of the scents of women and candles-as slowly, slowly the processions of masked brotherhoods (cofradias) carry their candlelit holy images beneath the mantillas and fans crowding windows and balconies above. Each street becomes a theater. Throughout the week, the different brotherhoods, in their tapering high hoods of blue, white, red, bear their great gilded sculptures slowly round the town. As the crowd jostles, as the candles smoke, so every now and then some voice, extraordinarily alone in all this ordered confusion, sings out a saeta (arrow)-a darting short couplet of agonized love for saint and city, sobbed and wrenched from the chest with all the sharp crisis of Arab-gypsy lament. 

Source: "Letter from Abroad" by William Sansom, Mc Call's, May 1966, p.48. 
 

Easter drumming 

     In Jumilla, Alcafiiz, and other villages south of Valencia, a tamborada takes place. In this event, drumming continues without stop for three days before Good Friday. In Hellin, in Albacete province, between eight and ten thousand drums are beaten between Holy Wednesday and Easter Sunday. On Good Friday everyone rises at dawn to climb between the chapels of the Calvary. Flowers and candies are thrown at the Virgin as she passes in procession. Even the children beat small drums as they process. 

Source: Spanish Fiestas by Nina Epton. New York: A. S. Bames, 1968, p.24. 
 

Moxigana, tiers of men, parade 

     Holy Week Pasos (tableaux) are created by men forming tiers, standing on each other's shoulders. A small child may crown the tier. They process to the music of pipe and drum, and form special designs such as the "Descent from the Cross." 
 

A dancing egg  

     At the Barcelona Cathedral an egg is set atop the jet of water in the decorated fountain in the cloisters. There it dances waters all day long. 

Source: Pyrenean Festivals by Violet Alford. London: Chanto and Windus, 1937, pp. 4O-4l.