Las Hogueras

I do not have words in English or in Spanish to describe this night. Las Hogueras is a festival in Alicante that celebrates the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year. I read a poem where the man refers to it as ¨the night that is converted into day.¨ At the beginning of the festival, beautiful statues are built around the city. There are about 86. Some of them are over 15 feet tall. For four days the city celebrates with a wake up call at 8:00 in the morning (marching bands and firecrackers down every street), mascletas in the afternoon (the loudest fireworks show you will ever hear), parades for the rest of the day, and then barracas all night long (dance parties in the streets). The whole city is awake for the entire weekend. And then Sunday night is when it all ends. Literally, with a bang.

So we prepared ourselves: tennis shoes and bathing suits under our clothes, and at midnight we were at the beach. Everyone waited until finally the palmera was shot off from the top of the castle. The most beautiful firework I have ever seen! It announced that the night had officially begun and we were off running down the street towards the ayuntamiento (town hall) where the official hoguera stood. The amount of people surrounding the beautiful statue was suffocating and then suddenly fireworks began going off around and off of the statue itself, which was doused in gasoline, and the whole thing took to flames. You felt the heat on your face and soon we noticed people ducking and moving out of the way. We looked up, hot ash was falling from the sky. The firemen went to work, and so did the crowd, taunting them with namecalling and chants for "Agua!" Soon, the firemen´s hoses were turned on the crowd with an uproar of cheers, but we didn´t feel the water because we were running up the street once again towards another calle, for another hoguera. This one was less crowded and we got front row seats. When the hoguera lit, we all jumped back a couple feet because the fire was so intense. This time when the hoses were finally turned on the crowd we were drenched in no time. We ran and found our barrio´s hoguera. There we watched it burn to the end.

We ran back to the apartment (by this time we had run over a mile that night) and changed into dry clothes. We found our neighbors and headed to the barracas for some dancing. We danced until 5:00 in the morning at which point we headed to the beach. We found one of our spanish friends there and sat talking with him until the sun rose over the beach. We learned later that you are not fully purified from the night unless you see the sun rise, so don´t worry guys, I´m pure. I think we finally went to bed around 8:00.

Más fotos: http://unlv.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2025611&l=8ab69&id=23709871

And how was your summer solstice? I hope you didn´t miss it!