Easter in Seville, or Semana Santa

Semana Santa is the holy week in Seville, it’s easter celebrated in a huge way. This holy week stems from the catholic church of course.

During this week you’ll find a lot of different brotherhoods doing processions. These processions usually show the suffering of Jezus and Maria, and they show it through their own paso’s. Paso’s are the platforms on which statues stand to tell a story.

These different brotherhoods all have different routes they take, they all start at their own church, walk to the cathedral and back. These brotherhoods are called, Hermandades and they differ in popularity and size. Because of that some processions are more popular than others.

There are different people that walk in these processions with different functions. The Costaleros are the people that carry the Paso’s.

There are the Nazareno’s, these are the people you see dressed in the white robes and pointy hats, they usually weir crosses and candles.

You might see these Nazareno’s and think, wait aren’t they the same robes worn by the Ku Klux Klan? And you would be right, except that the Nazareno’s wore them long before that group wore them. Except for the robes there is no connection between the two, so no worries.

The processions usually follow the same principle, at the head of the processions are the Nazareno’s followed by a music band which determines the walking speed, behind them you’ll see the big Paso’s and it ends with another group of Nazareno’s.