Burial of the Sardine

Burial of the Sardine

A Spanish Tradition

Have you ever thought about having a funeral for a fish!? A "Burial of the Sardine?"

Well, the Spaniards have. The longer we live in Spain, the more we find out about some interesting things about the Spanish culture. It seems like every month there is something to celebrate. For the month of February that celebration is Carnival.

Carnival is the Catholic and Greek Orthodox festive season that occurs every year before the season of Lent (the starting of the Liturgical Calendar). It's celebrated by combining elements of a circus, masks, and street parties. There is everything from family friendly parades to what I would call wild adult masquerade parties. During this pre-Lent season excessive consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods that are banned during Lent are consumed. Depending on where you’re at in Spain, you could see mock battles, food fights, social satire and mockery of authorities, abusive language, and degrading acts. Wikipedia and several other sources call Carnival a Western Christian tradition, but because of the grotesque amounts of deliberate sinful acts that people participate in, saying that this is a Christian tradition is way off base. (Remember that Spain is less than 1% Evangelical Christian.)

One of the Carnival traditions that we witnessed was the "Burial of the Sardine" in Alcalá de Henares. This was a fun, family friendly parade that took place in Plaza Cervantes. This parade celebrates the end of the Carnival season on Ash Wednesday. This represents the symbolic burial of the past, to allow society to be reborn, giving it strength, health, and growth.

This year the parade started in Cervantes Plaza in front of town hall. At seven in the evening Javier Rodríguez Palacios, the city mayor, lead the funeral procession through the streets of downtown Alcalá de Henares. This procession consisted of a man dressed as a Catholic priest blessing people along the way, a float of a Sardine carried by four men, a group of mourners, a second much larger Sardine float, a second group of mourners, then an Undertaker that blasted loud carnival style music and stopping to shoot of flairs, and finally there is a group of three mourning widows. And like most Spanish parades, the crowd followed behind the procession dressed in costumes. This parade ended in a field where men prepared the Sardine for burning by dousing it with gasoline while the Undertaker and three widows put on a little show for the crowd. As the Sardine burst into flames, fireworks shot out. Once the fire was out, the funeral was over which symbolized that the season of Lent has began.

This Spanish people know how to party and have fun, but it's not leading them anywhere they actually want to go. Please be in prayer for the Spanish people, that they will find the true source of joy, peace, and love through a meaningful relationship with the with the one true King…Jesus.