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.
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