It was the Mermaid fiesta this weekend. We went along to the start of it, but didn’t stay for the evening/night/early morning celebrations. This is the fiesta where people must vote on whether the mermaid is good or bad. Given a boat actually crashed into her island and sunk earlier this year, I didn’t hold high hopes for her, but I think she was voted as being good.
It looked a lot of fun – with so many people dressed in what would have been traditional dress. I don’t know who these people are, but it was pretty representative of what people were wearing,
People were setting up casetas on the beach, like they did for the romeria in Villagarcia. I don’t know if they rented their space or if it was informal, however at the end of the day the beach was full of these little party hubs.
We had a lot of fun watching this group of young lads putting up their caseta – it literally took them 20 minutes to get to this stage. This is actually quite a good pic as you can see the mermaid sat on her rock:
The highlight of the day had to be the mermaid with this band – it wasn’t till later we realized he was nothing to do with them – they had been mermaid bombed 🙂
Video ?
Video ?
and here’s more of the band – see how many people are dressed up!
Video ?
Video ?
There was also a Gaita band – which is the galician bagpipes Video ?
Fontao Fiesta
However the Mermaid fiesta was not the only fiesta that weekend – there was also one here!
There is a family from Pais Vasco (Spanish Basque region) who have a house in our end of the village and they were here for a couple of weeks at the start of the holiday and have been back for a couple of weeks now.
We noticed this poster appear on the bin – and the daughter and son came round to invite us to the second annual Fontao fiesta!
It was a very exclusive fiesta as we were the only other people from here who attended! However, an elderly couple who come to tend their huerta dropped in for a bit and the family who organized it had invited some friends, so it was a nice number and mix of people.
There were four different languages spoken – the family and their friends from Pais Vasco speak Euskara which is a unique language as it pre-dates the roman language and (apparently) is unique in that it is not influenced by other languages.
Some of their friends are from here and spoke Galego, other people Spanish and of course ourselves with English. It made for an interesting game of Bingo!
They put on some traditional Basque entertainment, which involved the children dressed as a bull with fireworks coming out of the horn – and some fighting with bits of foam on sticks, which I am sure must have had a significance.
Fiesta of the Fried Egg
And then Monday was the Fiesta of the Fried Egg.
This was astonishingly popular. This was the queue at 8pm when it started.
The history of this goes back to 1182 but died out and was rekindled in the 1990s. The monks used to give fried eggs to pilgrims as they were cheap and easy to do, and would set the pilgrims up for the next part of their walk.
It’s now morphed into a fiesta where people buy a plate of fried eggs with bread & beer and sit at communal tables with traditional music and activities. Apparently it goes on into the small hours (of course), however we just popped down to see what was going on and then headed home for a much less cholesterol laden meal!