Fiestas de la Virgen del Rosario

Description

Cambil holds its festivities in honour of the Virgen del Rosario, the town's Patron Saint, on the days before and after 15 August.
The town's livestock fair used to be held on 15 August.
However, until the early 1970s, the festivities took place in October, coinciding with the feast of the Virgen del Rosario; but due to better weather conditions and the greater number of returning emigrants, it was decided to move them to August. The date chosen to celebrate the Patron Saint's main festival was 15 August, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, both because it was the day of the livestock fair, and because in 1950 our Patron Saint took part in the dogma of the Assumption, proclaimed in the city of Jaén on 1 November of that year.
In 1599, just 28 years after the Virgin's miracle at the Battle of Lepanto, Cambil already had a brotherhood in honour of the Virgin under her title of the Rosary, and she was named patron saint of the town together with San Marcos, with San Mateo as co-patron, since the town was reconquered on this Evangelist's feast day.
This Brotherhood of the Rosary once organised, every Sunday in October, the dawn rosaries, held before the "first Mass". To call people to these dawn rosaries, held through the streets, this brotherhood, together with that of the Souls, would sing "las despiertas de la aurora" — what today is known as "La Tambora" — a tradition now confined to the feast of the Conception of the Virgin.