Last Monday, November 28th, the biggest festival of the year started.  It’s unique to Granada in that the big national holiday celebrating the Virgin Mary on December 8th is preceded by these 9 days of what seems like about 18 hours per day of celebrating La Maria withe fireworks and very loud brass/drum bands following the statue of the Virgin Mary around certain neighborhoods.  Our street was this past Saturday night, but Friday night was just two blocks away, and the last 2 nights also felt like only a block or 2 away.  The day starts with a 5 am band and fireworks parade with the statue on a small cart.  It then makes its way slowly around the neighborhood making stops at designated and requested houses for inside band performances and blessings.  The action picks up at a stage set up at one end of the neighborhoods main street about 6 pm, with bands, priests, nuns and others cheering on the crowd and praising La Maria, La Purisima. It’s a very big social scene with vendors stretched out over a mile or more of the nighttime parade route.  After 2 hours of action at the stage, the statue is loaded on to a special cart that each neighborhood has, big fireworks go off very close to everyone,  and the official parade slowly heads down the crowded street. Here are two videos on Saturday nights big moments.  The Gritaria, or call/response you can her in the video is”who causes such happiness/quien causa tanta alegria…La Maria, la concepcion Inmaculada de Maria”.

In the papers today, online, it was announced that the official holiday of the 8th is being extended for to the 7th and 9th.  This news hit about noon and we are yet to get any email notice about this affecting the kid’s school or my volunteer work.  We’ve read that holidays do get suddenly announced like this, but we’re not sure how extensively they are observed.  Also, we don’t yet know what actually happens on the 8th, the end of the Purisima festival.  I’ve heard that we can expect to see random acts of gift giving.   We’ll see.

Here are some other photos of the festival.