Feria Goyesca

Sometimes it takes a while to work out exactly what is happening in someone else's culture, especially when the cultural event is very locally rooted.   That is , of course, one of the great pleasures of travelling and discovering.

This evening Cathleen noticed what we thought at first was a wedding or family celebration taking place in the garden of our hotel in Ronda, a fascinating and very beautiful town in the mountains of Andalucia with an amazing gorge that runs right through it.

A number of wonderfully dressed women were having their pictures taken by lots and lots of well dressed guests.  

Later, having dinner outdoors at a restaurant facing onto a square by one of the many public gardens and terraces overlooking the gorge  (the temperature was into the mid 30s for most of the day and hadn't dropped much) we were aware of even more glamorously dressed people, of all ages, passing by and some technical preparations being made for what we thought was a party.   Then the elaborately dressed women we had seen earlier passed again, each accompanied by a smart, but much less well dressed, man.

After dinner we wandered down to where these couples were queued up waiting to get into something .  The "something" turned out to be an outdoor auditorium with a large stage.   Once the couples were seated in the front row there were a succession of speeches which appeared to extol the town though the subtleties of a fifty minute histrionic contribution from one man were completely lost on us - it was, in retrospect, I think a long story being performed.

By this time we had walked back to the hotel but we could see the stage quite clearly from the little balcony outside our room and the event  culminated in each of the women coming on stage and being presented with massive bouquets of flowers and some sort of commemorative broach or medal.

After an internet search - what did we do without Google - it eventually transpired that this seems to have been an early preliminary event for Ronda's annual "Feria Goyesca" or "Feria De Pedro Romero" which takes place at the end of August and into the beginning of September.

This has only been going since the 1950's and to quote the site I found   :

The Feria Goyesca (properly called the Feria de Pedro Romero) stems from the inter-relationship of three main personae which spanned over three centuries, all witFh strong connections to Ronda. They are the famous 18th century bullfighter, Pedro Romero; the extremely influential 18th century Spanish painter, Francisco de la Goya; and finally, the great 20th century bullfighter, Antoñio Ordóñez, to whom the vision of the Ronda's modern Feria Goyesca can be attributed.

It is an event in which the costumes of Goya's time are on show everywhere and tonight - I think - was a chance to see this year's creations for the first time.   My main pictures shows a few of them in the garden of the hotel and the additional photo is a collage of some of the other events of the evening.