The fiesta continued here in Puerto de la Cruz this week with the very bizarre Burial of the Sardine, which celebrates the end of the carnival.
That day, people of Santa Cruz de Tenerife celebrate the “entierro de la sardina” (burial of the sardine), and with this event the carnival is officially over.
\Tenerife, island, Santa Cruz de Tenerife provincia (province), Canary Islands comunidad autónoma (autonomous community), Spain, located in the Atlantic Ocean opposite the northwestern coast of Africa. It is the largest of the Canary Islands.
It is basically a parody of a funeral procession where the object of grieving is a giant effigy of a sardine, this event always falls on Ash Wednesday and is a symbolic burial of the past and marks the beginning of lent leading up to Easter.
Although Tenerife is an autonomous region of Spain, it actually lies within the Canarian Archipelago just 300 km off the west coast of Africa, thus giving it a unique blend of Spanish culture and African sun.
The sardine – buried in a symbolic ritual at the end of Carnival … What we do know is that many Spanish festivals end with the … The burial ceremony came to replace older Spanish customs held to mark the end of the winter.
The funeral procession is a mockery of the church where the participants dress as mourners, nuns, and priests.
The widows wail in their grief, most of the widows are men dressed as women to add to the mockery. It’s all very entertaining and lots of fun.
The procession is led by drums and a band that alternates from playing the funeral march to very upbeat dance-tunes
The initial procession winds its way through the narrow streets of Puerto de la Cruz to Playa Martinánez, here all the mourners gather into an even larger procession which then proceeds slowly along the seafront promenade of Martiánez back through the town’s streets to the harbor, where the sardine is put into the sea and burned in front of a large crowd lined along the harbor.
This is all very strange to us non-Spaniards, but this ceremony is carried out across Spain, its roots set long in the past. It is said to be because Charles III ordered Sardines to be delivered to the fiesta of lent in Madrid, all of which spoiled because of the hot weather, it was ordered all the sardines to be buried, and this quickly became a tradition.
