This is…Holy Week (ENG)

Curiosa historieta de un matrimonio noruego que llega a Málaga el Viernes de Dolores… ¡sin saberlo! [artículo en inglés]

This is…Holy Week.

And here we are, our non-stop flight from freezing Oslo has just landed in Malaga, where the sun shines on this warm day of April 9th, 2014. Even though it might just seem a regular Friday for which we found a cheap flight, it’s now Viernes de Dolores (Friday before Passion).

The train from the airport drops us off by a dry river, and we drag our luggage through a noisy avenue escorted by trees and followed by a rather dangerous bike path (at least compared to the ones back home), heading to our hotel, the AC Málaga.

Malagueño by choice, the hotel manager –Jorge González– welcomes us and explains the reason behind all of those strange-looking platforms and chairs that are spread around the bike paths: the Holy Week is about to start.

We are given some pamphlets containing information about streets and schedules; we are supposed to use them if we want to know where and when the processions are going to take place. That’s when we realize that we’ll be staying for a whole week at the hotel… That means it’ll be the whole Holy Week, the city will be so crowded, no relax for us!

On Saturday, we go for a walk by the paseo marítimo (waterfront boardwalk,promenade) and have the popular pescaíto (fried fish). On Palm Sunday (Domingo de Ramos), we are advised to wake-up early and find a place to witness the encierros – which is how the confinement of the tronos (floats or thrones) is called, but can also be understood as the “running of the bulls” in Spanish – so my wife, Erika, adds: “encierros? Is this the San Fermines? Please don’t stay on the bulls’ way… Oh, right, the platforms and fences explain it now, but the bullring is too far away, isn’t it?”. She’s definitely confused!

We were suddenly surprised by a huge group of people wearing strange long robes with their faces covered. Jorge’s friends inform us that those are called túnicas de nazareno and they have nothing to do with the American KKK. Right then, a symphony of sensations, colors, smells and music invaded the air: we got stunned, and that magical feeling accompanied us for the rest of the week.

We learned a lot of new words in Spanish those days, which were hard to understand, given the poor English of the locals: the Pascua (Easter), the portadores (bearers), cirios (candels), palio (canopy), trono (float) o saetas (dirges). We would have appreciated if the information had been translated into English or Norwegian, and a new friend we made, joked about how we should translate the saetas or dirges into our language.

On Holy Thursday, we were told it was the most popular day and how difficult it was to find some empty chairs to sit on. The Norwegian consul in Marbella put us in touch with Carlos Martínez, a very nice gentleman who gave us some chairs from where we were able to see some soldiers marching, called los legionarios.

These malagueños are crazy, no doubt about it! But, you know what? God bless their craziness! We’ll be back, we’ll spread the word about it and, above everything, we’ll make sure to share the over 2,000 photos we took!