The festivals and celebrations in Spain are full of life. This statement may seem superfluous to some, but it has its importance. Until a few years ago,
many of our most interesting celebrations were stagnating or simply lost. The ones meant are those that still preserve a purely local or, at the most,
regional character, ie., the ones that really signify a break in the life cycle of its participants and mark the passing of time much more effectively
than a simple date on the calendar. Those other festive occasions whose reputation has even gone beyond our national borders chose their destiny a long
time ago and hardly anything will substantially change their development.
But there are hundreds of small celebrations with ancestral rites which have
been preserved for centuries and even disappeared at some point. In the autonomous and officially multiform Spain, the lack of interest and appreciation
of the roots changed to new recognition and awareness of all the different expressions that compound the existence, reason and essence of the group.
It is not by chance that in the last fifteen years the number of celebrations has not shrunk, but on the contrary energetically grown by recovering customs and ceremonies that had already disappeared.
The next step in a hypothetical battle for preserving, as far as possible, that sense that gave them life
would be to stick closely to the traditions, to what has always been like that, removing alien traces which, in the long run, are always negative.
And with regard to the visitor, the inevitable --and why not?-- welcome stranger, we expect the necessary and indispensable respect for celebrations and
festivals that, apart from serving as a vehicle of communication, show the more friendly and human side of a social group and are living examples of a culture, of customs and traditions that we should be loath to lose.