Las Palmas carnival

By now we've been living on Gran Canaria for long enough to get a reasonably good idea of how the carnivals go here, and of course to take a decent amount of pictures. So I felt like writing it up. I've already done it once here, but now I know a little bit more.

Las Palmas carnival 2015

I was looking forward to my first carnival at Las Palmas and was not disappointed. While perhaps not as spectacular as the carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Las Palmas Carnival nicely combined both the show and street party, with audience participation levels very high. It is also very accessible - if you want to, you can see all the events for free, get a good view of all the participants - including the carnival queen and dames, or even ride on one of the floats in the main parade - there are places for hire, I didn't realize it before.

Santa Cruz de Tenerife Carnival Parade 2013

I've heard many times that the carnival in Santa Cruz de Tenerife is something worth watching. "Second biggest in the world", "immediately after one ends, everybody starts preparing for the next one", "amount of feathers and sequins like you won't believe", etc, etc...
Last year we were quite content with much more humble offering of Corralejo and Puerto del Rosario, but this year I figured I should go have a look at Tenerife.
Now, I am not an expert on carnivals. Carnivals that I saw in the UK are basically few days affairs, sometimes just one-day affair, when you have a procession and that's pretty much it. Here it is not the case - various events leading up to the main parade start a few weeks in advance. But I couldn't of course drop everything and go for a few weeks, so I restricted myself to just four days. That allowed me to see the two biggest parades on the island - one in Santa Cruz on the day of arrival, one in Puerto de la Cruz on the day of departure, with the Burial of the Sardine and drag "put your heels on" parade in Puerto fitted in between.

El entierro de la sardina (The Burial of the sardine)

I saw carnival processions before, but I never saw the El entierro de la sardina (The Burial of the sardine) up till yesterday. I looked it up and apparently other ceremonies like this - burning of an effigy, accompanied by a procession/ritual - exist in Spanish tradition in various places. The burning symbolizes cleansing, passing of old and new beginnings. In this case, it marks the end of the carnival. In "normal" circumstances, burial falls on Ash Wednesday, but, it being Fuerteventura, it's not really linked to anything, and feels like a way to end the carnival with a proper bang.

I didn't take any pictures, because it was dark and crowded, but below are some videos of the event. It all happened on the small main town beach in Corralejo.

First, we could hear the sound of samba drums and a small torch-bearing procession of people dressed in black appeared. They were carrying the large figure of sardine with them. It was placed on a podium. If you look to the right of the sardine in the second half of the video, you could see some people dressed as priests, and just about see a crucifix in someone's hand. The whole thing is meant to look like a funeral; priests and lamenting women ("adios! adioooos!"), the works.

Corralejo Carnival Parade 2012

Yesterday there was a carnival parade in Corralejo, the biggest of the several. I heard that it was going to be a big event, but didn't expect it to be on the same scale as one in Puerto del Rosario. I think it was bigger though, and more on the show side. Kirill is telling me that there were at least seven samba bands there (I didn't count myself), and when we leaving, the tail of the procession haven't started yet, so there might have been more. It lasted for two and a half hours, but we didn't stay for all of it - kids were getting tired.
We figure that the samba group above is not from Fuerteventura, although we could be mistaken. They were, deservedly, at the very beginning of the procession, had some simple, but effective dance routines, and their costumes were beautiful, too - check out these lace trousers in the facebook album.

Big carnival parade in Puerto del Rosario

The parade was a week ago already, but somehow there was no time to write it up before.

After extremely photogenic Achipencos I was looking forward to this parade. (Though, unlike Achipencos, carnival parade is not something specific to Fuerteventura, obviously).

I am certainly no connoisseur, but I've watched and photographed some carnivals in the UK, and so far Luton remains my firm favorite, what with all the feather-clad samba dancers and majorettes. Puerto del Rosario grand procession is somewhat short on dancers in feathers - there were three ladies dressed as the one above, but that was all, I think. It reminded me of very tame Saffron Walden take on the same event - dressed up people enjoying themselves on the floats (I saw a few floats with on-board BBQ), amateur samba bands of all ages and so on.

But it can boast an amazing level of participation - the procession was very long for such a small town, and it looked like at least half of the viewers were dressed up somehow. It was like one half of the inhabitants are in the procession and another standing along the route.

Achipencos 2012

Carnival started in Puerto del Rosario, capital of Fuerteventura, a few days ago. Big carnival parade will be next week and I am quite looking forward to it; today though there was something rather special. It's called Regata de Achipencos, Regata Achipencos, or just Achipencos. I won't pretend I understand what the word means,  probably nothing. The idea is that a few quite obviously sea-unnworthy vessels take to water in the Puerto del Rosario, crewed by strangely and/or cross-dressed people.

The  theme of the carnival in Puerto del Rosario was "fantasies"; that should have given the participants a lot of choice of how to dress. Given that, the number of Smurfs-crewed floats was rather surprising.

Luton carnival 2011

Second year we go to Luton carnival and it second year it rains on their parade. You can see the rain in some pics. Stupidly, I didn't take an umbrella out of the car, so we started moving pretty fast just as soon Acro Iris went past us, and didn't see the tail of the parade properly. It's a nice event though, rain or not.

Liverpool carnival

This beautiful young lady was one of the dancers at Liverpool carnival parade this saturday. The parade was not nearly as big or impressive as one in Luton, (I think there were maybe five floats, and ten or whereabouts groups of drummers and dancers), but it was a nice experience anyway. If I understood correctly, it's a relatively new thing, organized just for the last few years by a samba school in Liverpool, so it might grow into something much bigger eventually. that might make it a lot less accessible, though.

It was good to visit Liverpool. I was there only once before, years and years ago, on a dismal winter afternoon, and had mostly unpleasant memories. Now it looked lively and vibrant, very liveable. Sure, there are still parts of it that will probably benefit from a extensive flamethrower treatment, but hey, it's a city, what city doesn't have those, I ask you.

Luton Carnival 2010 - second (and the last) set

the day was dark and most of puctures I've taken are blurry or incredibly grainy (or both). fortunately, there are some good ones, too