Semana Santa in Seville and Aracena

We spent the day in Seville on Wednesday watching some of the pasos. They are the most spectacular parades with hundreds of penitentia and a ridiculous amount of pomp and incense. Thousands of people flock to Seville to see the pasos and some of the parades take 14 hours to get from their church to the main catherdral in the center of the city and then back again. It can take up to 50 guys to carry the paso itself and the right to do so is a greatly sought after honour. All the costaleros have to be the same height and they practice fo ages before hand as some of the streets are tiny and they have to do hugely complicated turning manouvers to get around very tight corners. Each time they completed one of these, there as a huge cheer from the crowd watching. Christmas passed without much of a bang but Easter is HUGE. Cortegana has its main paso tonight so I will add photos from that when it is done. We went to Aracena last night to Frank and Regina's house for a paso party. They live right on the main road to the big church on the hill and so the parade comes past their garden at eye level. It was a lot of fun and we got to meet some more extranjeros who live in and around town. We were very frowned at by the ladies behind the Mary paso as we were all standing around having drinks and enjoying the parade rather than being suitably sad and penitent,but as Stefan said we are all unbelievers anyway, so we will probably burn no matter what. On the whole it has been a great experience watching all the ceremony although I could have done without all the incence. Hope you enjoy the photos

Aracena's local Mary paso.The legen goes that she was commisioned by a church in Seville, but when they saw her, she was more beautiful than the Macarena, who is the chief Mary in Seville. Because of this, the church insisted that the sculptor make a new, not so beautiful Mary for them and she came to live in Aracena instead.