Semana Santa

Holy Week celebrations start the Friday before Good Friday in Cartagena. It is a bank holiday and the first procession is at 3am on Friday morning. We don’t attend but the drumming does interrupt our night’s sleep.
Semana Santa is very big deal here and there is a busy calendar of events for the week including a procession almost daily.
We go the evening processsion on the first Friday; it is massive and runs for an hour and a half. There are well over a thousand participants with elaborate and immaculate costumes. The costumes are shocking because the hoods remind us of the Ku Klux Klan. As more and more hooded people file past us we acclimatise to this Spanish religious tradition.
There is a wonderful sense community here and many of the participating groups are intergenerational which is so lovely to see.Read more