Making Alfombras during Semana Santa

I’ve read that the city of Antigua is the biggest tourist attraction in the world during “Semana Santa” which is the Holy Week of Christianity.  Antigua is a very Catholic city while only having a population around 40,000, it has at least 6 enormous and beautiful churches.  It seems odd to have 6 enormous churches in a small city area-wise of only 40,000 people, but most of them are reconstructions of old churches back from the 1700’s when Antigua was not only the capital of Guatemala, but the largest city in Central America.

            So, why is it such a big tourist attraction this week?  Aside from the general beauty of the town, every Sunday during Lent, one church has a “procesion” which is a huge parade that goes through the part of the city near that church.  The parade is enormous, with hundreds of people, a large band, and giant religious floats (carried by 20+ people often) of icons like the angel appearing to Mary, Jesus carrying the cross, etc.  All the people that live on the path of the procession make these “alfombras” which are beautiful decorations on the street out of their choice of colored sawdust, plants, vegetables, and/or flowers.  The procession then walks over the alfombras and it gets immediately swept up haha.  Other Spanish cities and countries have processions during Lent, but during Semana Santa in Antigua, there is not only a procession on the Sundays, not only every single day of the week, but MULTIPLE processions every day of the week.  There was a big one that started at 5am today and goes until 3pm.  There are others today starting at 2pm and 4pm.

            Building these alfombras is no easy task – you can see in the pictures above that they are incredibly elaborate and they take many hours to construct.  Yesterday was a procession of La Iglesia de San Francisco which is right near my house.  So I headed out of my house at like 9am yesterday and saw them constructing alfombras as close as right outside my door.  I happened to see a couple people I know checking them out and taking pictures and asked if I wanted to come along.  So I did, we walked maybe 1 short block until I saw 3 people I know helping make an alfombra for a nearby family.  I thought that was pretty cool and they asked if I wanted to help.  I was pretty pumped about getting to help (while incredibly nervous I’d ruin the whole thing) so I did and helped for about 3-4 hours save a half hour break to run a couple errands, which were my only original intentions for the day.  It required a good amount of careful, detailed work, but was a lot of fun too.  Some people were coming and going helping and I’d say it took probably 20 people more or less to do the whole thing with a lot of tourists taking pictures during.  My entire time there, I only worked on half of the entire alfombra with a group of 7-10 people or so.  OK, I’ve got a ton of pictures included with captions and that will pretty much tell most of the story itself while being way more interesting.  All I’ve got left to say is that you’re no longer the only artist in the family, Chrissy!! 

 

finding paul and maria working on the alfombra

me first joining in

tristan and paul fixing things up

part 1 (of 6) finished. that took a lot of work haha

2 parts finished! que bonita!

tristan and rory working on the crown

tristan and i working on the crown

the finished logo for Montserat Futbol Club

finished product

francesca proud of our work

view from wall we were sitting on

us chilling on wall waiting for procession

the alfombra after the procession

this alligator is made of bread. its part of the alfombra for a local bakery

float of jesus carrying the cross

“Reina del cielo” Queen of the Heaven