Fiestas de San Blas

Description

On San Blas's day, it is customary to light bonfires the night before, although the tradition of “playing the flag” in front of the saint as he is carried in procession has been lost. Whoever performed these distinctive flag-juggling moves aimed, after precise and eye-catching movements, to end with the flag fully wound around the pole, finishing with cheers for San Blas, echoed by everyone present.

On this day, the saint's traditional rosquillas are handed out, believed by popular tradition to protect anyone who eats them from throat ailments for the following year. A rather curious feature is the long-standing rivalry between La Puerta and Beas over possession of the image of San Blas. Tradition holds that it was found on 10 February 1565 by farmhands Juan José Sánchez, from Beas, and Antonio Ramírez, from La Puerta. The former claimed it for his town, having touched it first, while the latter maintained it belonged to his, since it had been found within his town's boundaries.

This gave rise to numerous rituals and disputes; one rather peculiar custom, once the image was settled in La Puerta, was the obligation of the so-called festival commissioners from both towns to provide the stewards organising the festival each year with a supply of wine, bread and meat for charitable distribution, two “celemines” of flour to make buñuelos, and a further three of toasted chickpeas to be handed out among all those attending.

Over time, other festive elements have been added to the ritual of San Blas, closely linked to the feast of the Purification of Mary — 2 February — which precedes it, such as the large amount of gunpowder used to make the celebration a truly thunderous affair.

Another custom, now vanished, was to bless the “caridad”, or bread to be given to the poor, on the eve of San Antón, and to light bonfires in the saint's honour.

On that day, children would go from house to house around the town asking for the “sanantón” — a kind of final Christmas gift — making themselves heard by ringing cowbells or banging frying pans and other kitchen utensils that could make noise. The saint was accompanied in procession to his hermitage amid the din of this monumental “cencerrada”.