The festival of San Anton

This special day starts with a church service for San Anton which gets underway to a full congregation just after 11 am. Once again we witness the best use of a patio heater as it is being used to heat the inside of the church which is always cold at this time of year. However, this time the gas manages to last until the end of the service as opposed to Christmas day when it ran out halfway through the service to everyone's disappointment.

San Anton is paraded through the streets accompanied by a group of musicians from a neighbouring village and the congregation, it's the only time he gets out each year!



Now comes the clever part. After the service, 2 "devils" collect a dish of food and/or wine from every inhabited house in the village.
Later in the afternoon the food which has been donated by the villagers is set out on long tables in the Plaza Mayor...

...where it is auctioned and bought back by the same people who donated it, so that we can have a meal with our peña groups that evening. We paid 25 euros each into our group fund.

This raised over 3,000 euros! The raffle for the joints of pork raised over 1,000 euros. Remember, there's only 150 full time residents here! However, quite a few more are here for fiestas and long weekends. The money goes to the town hall and this year they are planning on introducing lighting for the ermita.


The venue for our meal later that evening was in the ground floor "entrance hall" in one of the very old houses in the Plaza Mayor and as the bonfire from last night was still going the food was either heated up or cooked on it. The dishes that had been purchased in the auction were many and varied and truly authentic regional cooking. A couple of specialities worthy of mention were the beef tongue and the pigs trotters both in their delicious sauces. We also had fillet of beef cooked on the bonfire outside. Exquisite Spanish home cuisine!

The inside where we had our meal was just like the church only without the patio heater and for those of us near the door, rather chilly when the children kept going out then back in. However, the food, wine and the company were more than enough to keep our minds away from such simple matters and once again a wonderful time was had by all.

San Anton Eve

It's Friday evening and the bonfire is lit in the Plaza Mayor. In England the bonfires are an excuse to burn old timber and other burnable rubbish - here they build a bonfire from a few old olive trees! Sausages are cooked on some embers pulled to the edge of the fire where it is possible to get near without getting the cook too scorched and these are served to all in a chunk of bread.

Click on any image to see it full size.

Meanwhile pieces of pork are being deep fried by more modern methods.


Many years ago a pig would be slaughtered as part of the proceedings but now the carcase is brought where it is butchered on the traditional table.


The joints of pork are then raffled, the draw will be tomorrow.


The bonfire will be going for a few days without any more timber being added.

The whole activity with everyone eating and drinking goes on into the early hours.

3 Kings

When we took part in this 2 years ago I remember saying that I would never have believed we would be part of a candlelit procession walking through a medieval Spanish village. But here we are again and it is just one of the many different experiences we have been part of since we came here.



In Spain, children receive some presents on Christmas day but the big time to receive present is from the 3 Kings on the 5th January and this takes place after the arrival of the Kings to the church and then the procession to the hall which is part of the bar/restaurant.


The 3 Kings and their pages are on a raised platform and as the page calls out the name of the child, or adult, they go up the steps to collect their present. By the way, the black King seated in the middle is Floyd!

Collecting olives!

It's that time of year again and this year we are ready for it. We have about 20 olive trees on our land and this year quite a few of them have a reasonable crop. The farmers use a device on their tractor which grabs the tree and vibrates it shaking the olives into a large inverted umbrella.


We however, are using the more traditional method of hitting the branches of the tree with a long stick and then collecting the olives on one of the two large nets which are laid either side of the tree.


Margaret then sorted out the leaves - however, at the "olive co-operative" in the village they have tumbling machines which do the same thing.