Lights, Canopies, Action - the Feria de Seville

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SEVILLE

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SEVILLE

A week of flamenco, feasting and horses MAKES Seville’s April Fair the most spectacular festival in Spain

Lights, canopies, action Derek Workman

The clock strikes midnight on a Monday late in April, and the crowd assembled in the Real de la Fería in Seville roars with delight. The portada, the enormous fairground entrance, bursts into gaudy light, and one by one the 15 streets fill with the light of 22,000 bulbs encased in farolillos, small colourful paper lanterns. It’s lunes del alumbaro, Monday of Light, the opening night of the Feria de Abril, Seville’s biggest and most boisterous fiesta. The next six days will be devoted to flamenco, horses, food, drink and late-night partying, finishing the following Sunday with a spectacular fireworks display.

The Feria, Seville’s Spring Fair, dates back to 1846, when José María Ybarra, first Count of Ybarra, and Narciso Bonaplata held a livestock market. A year later, a three-day fair was officially inaugurated, with prizes given for the best bulls, oxen,

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Paul Webb

rams and horses. Within a couple of years, there were 93 taverns, 34 sweet stalls and 15 doughnut stands applying for licences.

Gradually small marquees were set up, the famous casetas, where the wives and families who accompanied the farmers began to entertain themselves by holding dances and general festivities. By 1910, the fair was declared a Fiesta Mayor by the city council, mainly as a way to encourage visitors, and so the Feria de Abril was born.

These days it’s held two weeks after Holy Week (the lateness of Easter means that this year’s fair will begin in May for the first time in living memory) and it has become the city’s most iconic cultural and festive event, the centre of social life, and an excellent excuse for Sevillanos to enjoy a week of partying with family and friends.

The streets of the tented village, said to be the biggest of its kind in the world,

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“even though we all live and work in seville, i might not see the others until we all get together for feria” are named after famous bullfighters and are covered with compressed albero, a bright yellow soil traditionally used in Seville’s bullring. In the early livestock ferias, the casetas were just canopies to shelter the people from the weather, but with the Sevillano love of frivolity, they became much more festive and are now the focus of festival life. These days they are large tents with green or red stripes and a triangular sign, a pañoleta, hanging over the entrance.

There are 1,047 casetas, belonging to eminent local families, groups of friends, clubs and businesses. Most of them

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are intensely private affairs, but each neighbourhood has one, which, along with those run by political parties, offers free admission to the general public.

While the feria officially starts with the illumination of the gateway at midnight, it traditionally begins with pescaíto frito, a dinner of fried fish, including baby hake, fresh anchovies and squid, served during the first evening of the fair. This is when the members of the caseta assemble. During the next six days there will be lunches, dinners, relaxing chats over tapas and visits

to friends’ casetas, but the pescaíto frito is one of the highlights of the week.

Antonio Jimenez, director of one of the loveliest hotels in Seville, the Casa Romana, (from €350 a night, book at hotels.easyJet. com), virtually grew up in the caseta his family shares with 19 other couples.

“The caseta really is the centre of life during feria. Even though we all live and work in Seville, I might not see the other members until we all get together for feria,” he explains. “It’s like an extended family, a place where we can invite friends and business acquaintances.”

At 2pm every day, young men on thoroughbred horses parade for the girls in flamenco frocks

“Feria has its rhythm,” he continues. “It usually begins around noon, when everyone comes dressed in their party clothes. The women will wear their flamenco dresses and the men will usually be in the traje corto, the closefitting suit with a short jacket, and will also wear the straight-brimmed, flat-topped hat called a cordobés. Some people go home in the early evening and return dressed for dinner at about 11pm, but it’s normal for people to stay the full day. The girls at Casa Romana often bring their flamenco dress to work to change into before going to the feria and then party until the early hours.”

One of the main attractions each day is the paseo a caballo, which begins at 2pm: beautiful thoroughbred horses and elegant, open carriages promenade up and down the streets. Young men in their traje corto sit on their horses with pride while slinky young girls in flamenco frocks wrap their arms around their waists. The carriages roll past pulled by pairs of horses, their heads decorated in yellow and orange pom-poms.

Each carriage has a registration number – odd and even numbers promenade on alternate days. It means that anyone wanting to take part in the paseo every day will need to hire both even and odd numbers – at a pretty hefty fee.

But it’s during the night that la calle

del infierno, the street of hell, comes to life. It’s an enormous fairground that gained its name from the noise made by the machines, the stalls and, of course, the visitors, as they bounce around on the dodgems and try to bag a teddy bear at a shooting range.

Eating and drinking are two of the essential pleasures for visitors. Bear in mind, though, that while those glasses of manzanilla sherry might seem light and refreshing, they can creep up on you.

To pace yourself, do as the locals do and drink rebujito, a mixture of manzanilla and a slightly sweet lemonade, served with plenty of ice to reduce the alcohol content.

And make sure you don’t drink on an empty stomach – Seville is renowned for

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its wonderful tapas: vast quantities are consumed during feria.

“Apart from the pescaíto frito, most of the food eaten during feria will be tapas,” says Shawn Hennessy, a Canadian who moved to Seville 18 years ago and set up her own tapas tours to help visitors discover the best places to eat (azahar-sevilla.com/sevilletapas).

“Obviously each of the chefs employed by the casetas will have his own style, but there are many superb tapas bars in Seville where you can try a huge range of dishes. At the simple end, there’s something like a racion of Serrano ham, or you can find ornate dishes prepared by some of the city’s top chefs.”

With an average of half a million people passing through the gateway to the festival every day, the feria could be an organisational nightmare. It’s the only fiesta in Seville that is totally organised by the town hall. Over the years they’ve

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“feria is a time for sevillanos to enjoy themselves, and for others to have fun too” 54 | TRAVELLER | APRIL 11

managed to refine an efficient process to make sure that everything goes according to plan. Rosamar Prieto-Castro is the teniente alcalde of the city of Seville (the equivalent of a deputy mayor) and the councillor in charge of fiestas and tourism.

“We don’t get much chance to rest after the feria is over because we begin organising for the next year on the first of July,” she says.

“The actual construction begins with the first support of the portada being erected on the first of December, the Día de la Inmaculada Concepcíon, one of Spain’s most important saint’s days.”

As well as being a member of a caseta with her husband, Prieto-Castro reveals that she is also a member of a women-only caseta, the only one in the feria: “A group of female friends have been getting together for lunch every Monday for more than 35 years, so we decided that we should have our own caseta. The caseta in which my husband and I are socios serves better food, but I have

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Guests enter the feria through the portada far left. The streets are lit by 22,000 paper lanterns

much more fun with the girls on our own,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.

Joining a caseta can be expensive. If you have a family, by the time you’ve paid for a new flamenco dress, outfits for the children, hired horses and then paid the bill for food and drink, it can set you back the best part of €6,000. So isn’t feria an elitist institution?

“No, it’s not,” says Prieto-Castro forcefully. “There are a number of casetas open to the public where you can eat, drink and dance to your heart’s content. If you are standing outside one of the private casetas watching what’s going on, you could well be invited in to take a manzanilla and a

tapa. It’s a time that Sevillanos take to enjoy themselves, and we also like to see other people having a good time.”

But if you are offered a drink and a tapa, remember that it’s not an invitation for the afternoon. Enjoy the food and drink, chat with your host, then thank them and leave, on to the next place for fairground fun.

This year’s Feria de Abril begins at midnight on 2 May and runs until 8 May. easyJet flies to...

Seville from London Gatwick.

See our insider guide on page 173.

Book online at easyJet.com

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