El Corpus

Description

The streets of this beautiful town in the Sierra Mágina are covered with floral carpets, and balconies are dressed with Manila shawls and embroidered bedspreads to welcome the Blessed Sacrament.

Manuel Urbano Pérez Ortega describes the Corpus procession as follows, in his book “Campanas y cohetes”, a calendar of popular festivals of Jaén: A procession that today is carried out in ways identical to those reproduced from medieval or more recent times, decorating the streets with sedge, lavender and other herbs, or, in the case of Cabra del Santo Cristo, carpeting the processional route with flowers, along which Manila shawls, bedspreads and other richly embroidered fabrics are also hung from balconies and windows — elements that likewise appear on the altars built by local hands along the route.

As we can see from the most recent photographs, everything is still done just as described, and just as it was in the early years of the last century, as shown in Dr. Cerdá's photograph — from one of the balconies of his house, petals are thrown down onto the Monstrance — although the route has changed; and one detail we can also make out in that photograph is that all the banners and flags of the town's brotherhoods used to process ahead of the Monstrance.