Culture
The Cruces de Mayo (Holy Crosses of May) is the most well-known and popular festivity in Lebrija. It is held during the first two weekends of May every year. It is a community activity where each neighborhood raises a cross, either using a permanent buttercross site or building them from scratch using flowers, forged iron or wood. These places around the town are then used for dancing and singing, particularly a local form of Sevillanas, known as Sevillanas corraleras.
The local annual fair is dedicated to the patron saint of Lebrija, Our Lady of The Castle, and held around her nameday, on 12 September.
The festivity of the Júas (Andalusian dialect pronunciation of the name Judas) takes place on Saint John's Eve. Local people get together and make lifesize rag dolls, representing celebrities and local politicians. These rag dolls are left outside of houses so they can be admired by others. At midnight they are set alight, together with a fireworks display, thus ending the festivity.
As in Seville and other Andalusian cities, towns, and villages, several hermandades, or religious brotherhoods, march in procession, carrying pasos, lifelike wood or plaster sculptures of individual scenes of the Passion of Jesus Christ or images of the Virgin Mary. One of the most important hermandades is Veracruz.
Lebrija is a flamenco centre and the Caracolá, one of the major flamenco festivals in Spain is held there every year in July.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)