In Southern Spain, a Pilgrimage (and a Party Too)
'For someone who is not remotely religious, the moment was almost surreal. Standing by a hillside stream in the Sierra Morena mountains of southern Spain, I was face to face with the wife of the mayor of a nearby town, and she was baptizing me.
She scooped water into her hand, asked me to lean over and dribbled it into my hair. “With this water we baptize you in the Stream of the Rooster, witness to your first journey,” the woman, Cabe Tébar Gil, said with a smile. Then, draping a small medallion on a ribbon around my neck, she declared me a pilgrim. With that, she kissed me on both cheeks and sent me on my way, with applause from the gathered crowd.
Although raised as a Roman Catholic, in Spain’s Basque Country, I had long since abandoned any connection to the church. And yet I did not need much persuading when a friend suggested that I join him for a trek — alongside thousands of other people — to the mountaintop basilica that holds the shrine of Our Lady of the Cabeza. Some 20 miles north of Andújar in the province of Jaén, the site was where, in 1227, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a shepherd and healed his afflictions.
Peregrinations to the site began shortly thereafter and have been an annual event since the beginning of the 16th century, interrupted only by the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Always held on the last weekend in April, it is considered the oldest romería — or religious pilgrimage — in Spain, a country that takes its holy holidays seriously even as the influence of the Catholic Church wanes.
What sealed it for me was learning that the romería and its attendant events would be nothing like the portentous, gloomy services, usually in impenetrable Latin, that I had to endure as a child. Instead, I was promised a vivid assemblage of ritual and pageantry in the manner of old-world Spain, full of style and accompanied by all manner of festivities, regional food, elegant parades of horses and carriages, beautiful attire and hours of music and flamenco dancing. In other words, a big party.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/travel/southern-spain-jaen-andalusia-pilgrimage.html?
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