Día de la Cruz - Marci

On the 3rd of May in much of Spain they celebrate the “Día de la Cruz” (Day of the Cross), also called “Cruz de Mayo” (May Cross). It is especially important in Andalusia and Granada is very famous for it, being popular both with the locals and people travelling here just to see it. But what is it really about? It is a religious festivity that basically involves decorating a cross and creating a huge installation around it, which people go around and see, and in some places, it also involves food and dancing. And why do people do this? Well, that’s a tougher question, with a mix of Christian and pagan traditions being mixed. I think for most people, the religious significance is lost by now, but it still continues to this day. If you want to know more about it, you can check HERE or HERE – I just wanted to see the festivities themselves.

I set out to explore some of the festivities with Aisling in the morning. We didn’t really know what was going on, we just wandered around the city, finding some of the crosses in the city center, then we headed up to Albaicín to see what was up there. In the Albaicín they seemed to be only doing the celebrations in school yards, although there were a couple of those – in other parts of town there is a variety of types of installations and they even have a competition. In the competition they have four categories: streets or squares, patios, shop windows and schools.

After lunch, we headed down to the Realejo neighborhood and met up with Dani and Antonio, who gave us some much-needed backstory on the whole celebration and showed us around. It’s always better to see these things with local guides! We wandered through Realejo, looking at the patio installations. Generally, they would consist of a cross decorated with red flowers, along with a huge variety of stuff around it – from desks, cutlery, food, copper pots all the way to statues and plants.

We also looked at some of the street installations, although there weren’t that many of them. We saw the winning shop window – which was funny, because the shop window itself didn’t seem like such a big deal at first, but then we realized that pretty much the whole house above it was decorated. Dani was telling us about how this year there seems to have been a decrease in the number of installations over previous years, especially when it comes to street installations.

While it is cool to see these and I like how many people our out on the streets enjoying a day exploring Granada, I don’t fully get the hype about it. Once you’ve seen a couple of the crosses, you’ve seen them all – almost all of them look the same and while there are a lot of differences in the stuff around them, seeing at least 10 of them, they became a bit boring. Apparently, in some of the villages there is more variety to them, but in Granada the competition rules seem to stifle more creative approaches to the festival.

It also seems like the celebration was smaller this year than in previous ones, so all the dancing and partying that I heard about wasn’t really there – in the schools, people were mingling, eating, drinking and chatting, but it would be rare to see anyone dancing. By the street and patio installations, people were just looking around and of course shop windows were the same too. Overall it was an interesting and unusual festivity to see, but I’ve heard so much hype about it before that I feel like it just didn’t live up to the expectations that I had based on what people were telling me about it.