3/9 - Friends and Fiesta's

Today our friends Bob and Jackie arrived from the UK, bringing with them (as we ask most people to do) all those little things that we need to have sent over from "home" - although I have to say that Spain is feeling more and more like "home" every day.

In true Thorogood style Bob had a little job for me to do, his PC was knackered when he tried to turn it on -payback to me for him bringing our English goodies over ;-)

Although why on earth he needed to get into his emails less than 6 hours after leaving them back in the UK Heaven only knows - and I thought I was addicted to the Internet!

Anyway, it was great to catch up with them in their apartment in Torrevieja and Jackie laid on a bit of lunch as well – all very nice.

In the evening we all decided to go down to Santa Pola to watch the “Moors & Christians” parade, we had previously arranged with our other friend, Ralph to collect him and go to the parade together. The Moors & Christians is one of Spain’s biggest festivals and are held to commemorate the battles, combats and fights between Moors (or Muslims) and Christians during the period known as Reconquista (from the 8th century through the 15th century).

The streets were lined with chairs (5 deep at parts on both sides) and the lines ran the whole length of the town – and amazing number of people turned out and we couldn’t help but to comment on the fact that a similarly sized town in the UK (Wellingborough) were considering stopping their carnival because of lack of interest!


The parade was supposed to start at 8:30PM, however true to the manaña attitude of our adopted countrymen it actually started about an hour or so late; it was well worth the wait! Wave after wave of groups of men, women and children passed the spot where we had decided to stand and watch, each group an elaborate theme based on either the Moors or the Christians, as you can see from the photos. What the photos don’t do justice to is the mock battles and other moving displays that passed by us, little re-enactments of Moors invading, pillaging and finally being beaten back by the Christians, all acted out on the move past us. Following each group was their band – I lost count of the number of individual bands that we saw that evening but there must have been at least 50!

Each group that passed had a group of walkers (or dancers or fighters) followed usually by a float pulled by a tractor and then by a band, I am sure that I spotted the same “happy” tractor driver that I commented about on the 3 Kings Day parade, see if you think it’s the same guy - http://ourspanishadventure.blogspot.com/2007/01/61-three-kings-day.html

Each group of dancers we were told were each responsible for buying / making their own particular costume, some of them must have cost 100’s of euros each.

We watched the processions for about 2 hours before it became too late and we became too tired of standing to continue – poor Bob has a dodgy knee at the best of times and had already decided to sit down on the pavement as he found the pain of standing to be too much. It was clear that the parade was going to continue for some time yet, we made our way out onto some of the back streets to see whether we could find a little bar to have a sit down and a drink – it was now around 11:30 at night.

Liesl quickly located a bar, no surprise there then, and we went inside for a drink (Ralph was taking the photo btw) while the crouds subsided outside, after about an hour it was all over and we were able to wander along to the car and drive home – a really great experience.