Semana Santa

What it commemorates

The Passion: the events from Christ's entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday through the arrest, trial, crucifixion and burial, to the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. The sculptures carried through the streets depict those scenes, and alongside them the Sorrows of the Virgin.

This is worth stating because older accounts of the week list things that have no place in it — the Annunciation, which is a separate Marian feast in March, and the Sermon on the Mount, which is not a Passion subject at all.

How old it actually is

Older accounts describe processions stretching back fifteen hundred years. They do not.

Andalucian Holy Week as it is now performed took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a product of the Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent required the penitential brotherhoods to conform to doctrine and shed extraneous custom, and the point of them was to take the liturgy out of the church and into the street, where everybody would see it. By 1578 more than thirty brotherhoods processed in Seville, and in 1604 the cardinal archbishop imposed the rule that each must pass through the cathedral — the origin of the carrera oficial, the official route, that still governs the timetable.

A handful of individual brotherhoods do trace medieval roots — El Silencio in Seville to 1340, El Gran Poder to 1431 — and penitential processions are a late-medieval idea in general. But the floats, the routes and the great majority of the brotherhoods are early modern. Processions were suppressed under the Second Republic and revived afterwards, and several brotherhoods were founded or refounded in the twentieth century.

One piece of history to correct

Older accounts say these festivals were forbidden under Muslim rule and resumed after the Reconquest. That is chronologically impossible: Seville fell in 1248 and Granada in 1492, and the processional tradition is later than both, so there was nothing to forbid and nothing to resume.

There is a kernel of fact underneath it. Christians under al-Andalus — the Mozarabs — held the legal status of protected but subordinate subjects. They kept their faith, their bishops and their own law in internal matters, in return for taxes and acceptance of Muslim rule. The restrictions did include a ban on public displays of faith such as processions and bell-ringing, along with bans on building churches and on proselytising, and enforcement varied a great deal between dynasties. So public Christian processions were indeed restricted — just not these ones.

The words, which make the week legible

• Hermandad or cofradía — the brotherhood: a lay religious association that owns the images and organises the procession. Only the penitential ones process in Holy Week. Seville has nearly seventy taking part.
• Paso — the float carrying the sculptural group. In Seville one can weigh more than a tonne.
• Costaleros — the bearers, who carry the paso from underneath, on shoulders and neck, hidden behind a curtain, between twenty-four and fifty-odd of them. They were hired dockworkers until 1973 and have been brotherhood members since. A capataz directs them from outside by voice and by a ceremonial hammer, because they cannot see where they are going.
• Nazarenos — the robed penitents walking in pairs ahead of the paso, carrying tall wax candles or wooden crosses, some barefoot.
• Capirote — the tall conical hood worn with the robe.
• Saeta — an unaccompanied flamenco lament sung to a paso as it passes, often from a balcony, and almost always unannounced. The procession stops for it.
• La Madrugá — the small hours of Holy Thursday into Good Friday, the climax of Seville's week. Processions set out after midnight and some are still walking at midday.

Malaga does it differently and uses different words: its floats are tronos, carried by hombres de trono on the shoulder from outside rather than from beneath, and the largest need upwards of two hundred bearers.

The hood, and the resemblance nobody mentions

British and American visitors seeing a column of hooded figures for the first time are often badly startled, and it is better to know in advance than to work it out in the street.

There is no connection, and the influence runs the other way. The capirote comes from the medieval flagellant and penitential tradition and is centuries older than the Ku Klux Klan. Its purpose is anonymity: the penitent's face is hidden so that the penance is not performed for an audience, a practice grounded explicitly in the Gospel instruction not to parade one's fasting. The Klan — a white-supremacist and, as it happens, anti-Catholic organisation — adopted the shape in the early twentieth century, its costume traceable to the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.

The form does carry a second and darker association within Spain itself: the Inquisition made the condemned wear a conical coroza in public as humiliation, with the colour indicating the sentence. That is a separate, coercive use of the same shape.

Where to see it

Seville and Malaga are the two biggest and best known, and Granada and Jerez de la Frontera are the other two that draw visitors from outside Spain. Seville, Malaga and Granada all hold the Spanish state designation of International Tourist Interest.

The character differs. Seville is the solemn extreme — El Silencio's procession is followed by a silent crowd — while Malaga is more mixed, with some days sombre and others carrying a frank street-party atmosphere around the processions. Granada has the advantage of the setting.

Brotherhoods worth knowing by name in Seville: La Macarena, whose Virgin is the city's most loved image and whose procession goes out in la Madrugá with some three thousand participants; El Gran Poder, whose Christ is called the Lord of Seville; and El Silencio, reckoned the oldest. Note that El Gran Poder and Jesús del Gran Poder are the same brotherhood, not two, as older accounts have it.

Practicalities, which are not optional

• Book accommodation months ahead. Seville sells out entirely, and many visitors end up staying in towns outside the city.
• Get the routes and timetables. Each city publishes itinerarios y horarios, and they are essential. Processions bar traffic from the streets they use and, more to the point, they make the centre impossible to cross on foot — a ten-minute walk can become an hour, or simply cannot be done.
• Expect to be up at night. Processions run from Palm Sunday to Easter morning and last anywhere from four to fourteen hours, and the most striking of them are nocturnal.
• Allow for closures. Access to the cathedrals and to the Alcázar in Seville is restricted during the week, many restaurants and bars shut, and dense crowds bring the usual pickpocketing.

Working out the dates

Holy Week runs from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, and Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. The Church calculates this from a table rather than from the sky, using an ecclesiastical full moon and treating the equinox as fixed at 21 March, so the result does not always match the astronomical answer. Western Easter can therefore fall anywhere between 22 March and 25 April.

Seville's Feria de Abril follows two weeks after Holy Week, which means that in late-Easter years it is not in April at all. Anyone trying to catch one and avoid the other should check the calendar rather than the name. General practicalities for the region are on the Andalucia page.