La Fiesta de Pan

The following comes to us from Almeira, Spain. A friend's first hand account of the increased violence at Spanish Bread Festivals:

My roomate is from a SMALL town of about 1,000 people, an hour from Huercal (a city in the Almeira region), and a couple of weekends back, we attended the day of their patron saint, San Sebastian. To honor him, an annual Bread Festival or 'La Fiesta de Pan' was held.

First we went to mass in San Sebastian's church. As mass ended, the street leading up to the church's door was COMPLETELY full of people. We were stuck on the steps waiting to see the unveiling of the statue of San Sebastian. It was decorated with loaves of bread tied to the cross he carried. As we were waiting, we watched people throw rings of bread (los roscos) from their 2nd floor balconies to people in the street below. Then as the saint came down the narrow street, a band played behind it where people followed, catching the bread being thrown, stringing them onto long strands of rope to make it easier to carry. We used a shopping bag.

Since there were so many people, a lot of the balconies were out of bread when we reached them. My roomate decided we'd take a short cut over to a different part of the route to see if we could catch some there. It was crazy. At one point people began throwing bread from the top of the roof of a two story apartment builiding. It doesn't matter how soft the bread is when you're hit in the head from two stories up.

We put ourselves up against the wall with bread flying past us left and right, trying to catch a few. Now, it helps to know that my roomate is incredibly short, even for Spanish standards, so being the tallest, I was nominated to go into the middle of the street and try to catch roscos.

At first I felt weird to wave my hands and shout at people in the balconies, asking them to throw bread to me (it's like kids at a parade waving at floats to throw them candy, except we're all adults and in the middle of the street), but after a while I got over it, and was waving my hands left and right trying to catch bread. Unfortunately, I never caught one in the air. All of our eight roscos were caught on the rebound, off the ground. But hey, the five-second rule is an international, right?

Well, after about an hour of laughing at the craziness of this event and dodging flying bread, we went back to a friend's place to eat our bread with canned anchovies and tuna.

It was great. I was in complete awe of the entire proceeding. Never in the US would you find a festival where people throw loaves of bread to the crowds. I guess it's a tradition that emerged way back in the day when people were quite poor. The church would throw bread to the peasants as they followed the saint. It just kind of stuck.