The Bonfires of Saint John (Spanish: Hogueras de San Juan, Catalan: Fogueres de Sant Joan, Galician: Noite de San Xoán) is a popular festival celebrated around Saint John's day's eve (23 June) throughout many cities and towns in Spain; the largest one takes place in Alicante (Alacant), where it is considered the most important festival in the city. The bonfires are particularly popular in many Catalan-speaking areas like Catalonia and the Valencian Community, and for this reason some Catalan nationalists regard 24 June as the Catalan nation day.
For this festival, people gather together and create large bonfires from any kind of wood, such as old furniture, and share hot chocolate while teens and children jump over the fires.
Famous quotes containing the words bonfires, saint and/or john:
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“Child in the womb,
Or saint on a tomb
Which way shall I lie
To fall asleep?”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)