CARNIVAL CELEBRATION, THE CRAZIEST PARTIES IN SPAIN

This year carnival celebration will start in Spain next 3rd March. Carnival in this country is celebrated nationwide though the most raucous festivities are in the Canary Islands, Cadiz and Sitges. While each town has its own unique flavour of celebration, they all have a devotion to having a good time. In these main destinations during Carnival it seems that no one sleeps as the drinking and dancing go from dusk until dawn. You can see extravagant costumes and people in masks everywhere, and in any of Spain's Carnivals, you'll have a lot more fun participating in the masquerading than you will just watching.

About their origins, most popularly it is believed the term Carnival derives from the words "farewell to the flesh," a reference to the excesses that led up to the sombre Lent. Some suspect Carnival is derived from the Roman solstice festival, the Saturnalia, where participants indulged in much drinking and dancing. Saturnalia is believed to have had the first parade floats, called the 'carrus navalis'. Probably these pagan roots were the explanation why they were banned for forty years during the General Franco dictatorship.

The most popular and beautiful carnival in Spain (and probably in Europe) is the one that takes place in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, it is really a great spectacle to see all the extraordinary costumes parade with dresses made of beads and satin and feathers, each one more flamboyant than the last one. But although this is the most amazing, in fact, during these carnival days, in every single little town of Spain, people are eager to wear a disguise and have a good time during ten days!

By the way, I promise to bring to this blog more amazing photos of 2011 Carnivals and update this post in a few days.

KING JUAN CARLOS I AND 23-F COUP, 30 YEARS LATER

30 years ago today a mustachioed Lieut Col Antonio Tejero, proudly wearing the uniform and a shiny tricorne hat of the Guardia Civil, burst into the main chamber of the Spanish parliament brandishing a gun. Thus began what Spaniards refer to as 23-F, the attempted coup of February 23rd, 1981.

Tejero was the frontman of a military-led operation against Spains’s fledgling democracy. General Franco, the last of Europe’s prewar dictators, had died fiave and a half years earlier, still in power and the parliamentary monarchy that the new King Juan Carlos I had established was far from solid.

The death of Franco elevated Don Juan Carlos de Borbón to the throne. Until Franco’s death Juan Carlos had remained in the background and eemed to follow the dictator’s plans of appointing him his successor as head of state and later King of spain. Once in power as king, Juan Carlos facilitated the development of the current political system, as his father Don Juan de Borbón, had advocated since 1946.

So, the so called Spanish transtition was the era when Spain moved from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco to a liberal democratic state. And the transition began with Franco’s death. Nevertheless, the transition proved challenging, as the spectre of the Civil War (1936-1939) still haunted Spain.

And this coup attempt proved to be later as a defining moment in introducing democracy to Spain and at the same time, everybody agree that the role played by King Juan Carlos that long night was just crucial for the democracy in this country.

Here you can see a video of King Juan Carlos speech when at dawn he lead to the country to support the democracy process and this speech eventually led to the failure of the coup:

 

JOSE VILLEGAS Y CORDERO, A REGIONALIST PAINTER

Jose Villegas y Cordero was a Spanish painter, born in Sevilla (1844-1921). At 16 he sold his first work in the Seville World Fair. He studied for several years in Madrid, where he often went to the Prado Museum to copy to Velazquez and his technique acquired the spontaneity and the use of color of Velazquez. Also he greatly admired orientalist painting and traveled to Morocco and later on to Rome, whose early work there was about local customs topics (there he would paint many subjects of bullfighters), though he actually painted about many different subjects. In 1901 he was appointed director of the Museo del Prado, moving to live from Rome to Madrid, where he died.

And these are some of his paintings: