The Seville Fair

Not one for the introverts.

For my money, the best week to visit Seville is during La Feria de Abril.

There are three reasons for this: one, your visit will correspond with one of Spain’s best-known, most eagerly anticipated, and visually stimulating celebrations, which brings together extroverted Andalusian traditions into a fairground setting. Second, the weather is in that mid-20s sweet spot. Third, as all focus is on the Los Remedios neighbourhood where the festival takes place, the city centre is unusually quiet.

When it comes to celebrations, Andalusians have breathtaking constitutions. La Feria de Abril lasts for about a week and, from what I can tell, involves copious amounts of all-day (and night!) drinking, eating, dancing, bullfighting, and horseback riding.

The festival started as a cattle fair in the mid-1840s. In place of stables, more than a thousand personalised ‘casetas’ (tents) line a vast fairground area in the southwest of the city. Most belong to local families, friends, businesses, and so forth, exclusive to invited guests and often manned by officials who check off names as people enter. (Some casetas are also available to the public, including a designated tourist tent.)

Casetas, which are individually decorated, have a bar, kitchen and sound system, with bands playing local folk music, known as Sevillanas. During the day, locals parade in carriages or on horseback, often carrying glasses of rebujito, a mixture of manzanilla sherry and lemonade. In general, men are in suits — those on horseback also don wide-brimmed hats and fancier garments — while many women wear traditional flamenco dresses. Tapas is served from lunchtime through to the early morning, with guests eating a myriad of local favourites, including fried fish served in paper cones.

It’s not easy to convey the sheer scale of the festival and the number of casetas lining the fairground, nor the way in which you travel back through time when you enter under the elaborate gateway, so I’ll leave you with this video edited and recorded by Ioana Silion, filmed during our visit in mid-April.

Thanks for watching; see you next week! x

Song: Sevillanas de Triana · Aromas de Feria.