Spain is a nation known for its oddball religious – and secular – festivals that seem baffling to the outside world. Often tied to Catholicism but with hints of the pagan, these village-specific events can be insular and brutal (look at the horrific ways that donkeys have met their end in some dreadful backwaters) while others can be big tourist draws. Sometimes, the two seem to come together, as in the running of the bulls – but usually, these are simply weird celebrations that mix serious Catholic celebrations – every village will at least have a giant statue of the Virgin Mary that is paraded through town at Easter – with more pagan rituals celebrating the harvest such as the Calçotada, the celebration of the onions known as calçots that are grown in Catalonia and the famed Tomatina tomato festival. And then there is the El Colacho festival.
The Salto del Colacho is a week-long event in Castrillo de Murcia in Northern Spain that takes place to mark the Corpus Christi feast and culminates with a secondary baptism of sorts for local babies. Like many religious festivals, it mixes the Catholic and the pagan, though in this case, the two elements have remained somewhat separate – El Colacho is the Devil, who appears to terrorise locals and punish young people for their bad behaviour. There is no place for him in orthodox Catholicism and the locals seem to accept that he is more connected to folklore than Christianity.
Now, we all know that a lot of Christian rituals and holy days have been lifted from the pagan past and that many European countries still have pagan celebrations built into their DNA, often rebadged as harmless traditions to disguise their distinctly unChristian origins. May Day celebrations like the May Pole have been neutered enough for Christians to happily co-opt those celebrations – I remember that the May Pole was an annual tradition at my Church of England primary school without anyone questioning the presence of a pagan fertility symbol. Then again, my school taught us about dinosaurs in the morning and Noah’s Ark in the afternoon, so the whole Christian message was already very confused.
But I digress. Back to El Colacho.
The week of celebrations – which attract locals, curious tourists and ex-pats wanting to connect with their traditional upbringing – culminates with a day of punishment and redemption, beginning with a series of hourly circuits of the village by various locals dressed as El Colacho, a yellow-suited harlequin with an unsettlingly creepy, expressionless mask covering the face. The festivities begin with him punishing the local teens for the night of drinking and partying that they had enjoyed before, which involves the hungover youths taunting him as he chases them with a whip. A whip that is used to hit any of them who don’t run fast enough. Later in the day, it’s the turn of the pre-teens to be chased and whacked, which seems a bit harsher – although it is all symbolic, on a few of the video clips that I’ve seen, the whacking looks quite hard. Still, it’s all in good fun and I suppose that it is not that different from other traditions ranging from the Krampus celebrations to the Morris Dancer’s fool/beast/hobby, all involving performative punishment of the gathered crowd. In fact, much of the El Colacho celebration looks suspiciously like Morris Dancing. But not all of it.
The day culminates with what everyone has come to see. A row of babies – from a few days to a few months old – are laid out across a series of mattresses that stretch across the main road of the village. These children are mostly the freshly baptised children of locals, though there seems to be a bit of leeway given for the very young or slightly older, especially post-pandemic when the festival was cancelled for a couple of years. No one wanted their kids to miss out and when there are not enough local offspring, babies with some vague connection to the village are shipped in from all over the world. Then, the lead Colacho and his second-in-command run up the street and jump over each mattress of babies. The idea is that the ritual cleanses the children of original sin – one of Catholicism’s dodgiest concepts. The Colachos are followed by rose petals being thrown at the babies and the local priest blessing the nippers.
Now, this might not sound too terrible – there is no suggestion that the men doing the jumping have been drinking during the day and it is all taken very seriously. It seems to be the provision of young and fit men rather than open to all-comers, which was the awful thought that I had when I first heard about it. And they have the sense to remove the mask before doing it. But still. Jumping over a mattress, even a single mattress, isn’t quite as easy as it looks and these are often doubles – all it takes is for a foot to dangle that little bit too low or a toddler to suddenly raise its head for disaster to strike. Yet amazingly, there have yet to be any accidents – or if there have been, no one is telling. An ambulance stands by but what help it would be to a newborn who gets kicked in the head is open to question. I imagine that a single injury would be the end of the whole thing.
The Catholic church does not approve of this event – in 1621, Pope Gregory XV gave it his blessing, which gives you an idea about how long this has been going on for, but in more recent years it has become something of an embarrassment, the pagan connections clashing with the church’s approved form of superstition and ritual and the whole idea that the event overrides actual baptism being a bit of an issue. Local priests have been advised not to take part but they generally take no notice – they have to live in the community, after all. Like the Penitentes and Vattienti in Italy, the devout Catholics of Castrillo de Murcia are not about to allow the Vatican to tell them how they should behave. The festival is a big deal locally, the highlight of the year – it dominates local street art with full wall murals like the one you can see at the top of this piece – and for many it is a genuinely emotional experience. You take that away from people at great risk.
Babies successfully jumped, the locals then eat, drink and party into the night. I’ll say one thing about Spanish religious festivals – they generally seem to be a celebration of life rather than wallowing in misery and shame, and you’ll probably have a good time at most of them even if you are an ardent non-believer.
And is this really any crazier than Britain’s cheese-rolling in Gloucester, where life and limb are risked for no good reason beyond sheer exhilaration? OK, that event doesn’t involve chasing a baby down a steep hill, but still – there are mad local rituals all over the world and thank God for that. In a world of increasing conformity and uniformity, it is a relief to see odd, incomprehensible local activities surviving in the face of opposition from the powers that be.
This year’s event is scheduled for June 2nd.
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