How a sun holiday in Spain became a challenge to long-held prejudices

There had to be more to Spain than high-rise hotels (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
Patrick Comerford

For all my adult life I resisted the idea of going on a package holiday to Spain. For 40 years or more, I have travelled around the world for work and pleasure. But, apart from a weekend city break in Madrid five years ago – and that hardly counts – I had never been to Spain for a holiday.

You could say I did not know my Málaga from my Marbella, my Frigiliana from my Fuengirola, or the Costa Blanca from the Costa Brava and the Costa del Sol.

I took Spanish at school for five years, motivated perhaps by stories that it was an easier language to learn than French, German or Italian. I had inspiring teachers who introduced me to Spanish literature, from Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote to 20th century poets such as Federico García Lorca, and Spanish artists from Velázquez, Murillo and Goya to Miró, Picasso and Dalí.

Why, I even managed to pass Spanish at Intermediate and Leaving Certificate levels, although 45 years later I have managed to forget most of the Spanish I learned at school.

I think my reluctance to go on a package holiday to Spain was partly due to my own snobbery, disguised as political certitude. Spain was the land of Franco, Guernica and the garrotte; Spain was a land of brutality symbolised in the bullfight and the civil war chillingly depicted by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia; Spain was the land of the Spanish inquisition and the brutal expulsion of Jews and Muslims; Spain, before the package holiday industry boomed, was popular with Irish people whose political sympathies on one hand were with the Blueshirts in the 1930s, or on the other hand with Frank Ryan who had defected to Nazi Germany.

Journalistic colleagues, including Paddy Woodworth, Colm Toibin and the late Jane Walker, chided and upbraided me for my inhibitions. But these prejudices persisted, reinforced by Monty Python sketches about Torremolinos, with half-built, high-rise hotels, Watney’s Red Barrel and pools with no water. Monty Python even reinforced my images with that sketch on the Spanish Inquisition.

Wanting more from holidays

Madrid was fine. I was there for a city break, enjoyed art galleries, museums and stately architecture, and experienced May Day.

But I knew Greek olives and olive oil were superior to Spanish olives and olive oil, and the same could be said about Greek and Spanish wine, coffee, music, poetry, mezzes or tapas, and even beaches. Zorba could out-dance Flamenco any evening. But Costa only meant coffee to me, and I had no intention of taking a Costa holiday. Holidays were not merely about sun, sand, sea and sangria. I wanted the sun, sand and sea, but in measured proportions that also took account of archaeological sites, cathedral architecture and other cultural interests.

Well, that is, until this Easter.

I have already experienced the beauty and rich spirituality of Orthodox Easter in Greece and in Cyprus. This year, Easter fell at the same time in the calendars of the Western and Eastern Churches. Easter in a Greek town or village seemed like a good idea, until we found most of the available flights and packages were priced exorbitantly – after all, every Greek wants to be at home for Easter.

Processing the Crucified Christ though the streets of La Carihuela (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
A second option that came to mind was southern Italy, with the great Holy Week and Easter processions in places like Sicily. Once again, however, it was difficult to put together the right package, at the right time, at the right price.

The travel agent at Rathgar Travel in Dublin asked, ‘Why not Spain?’

‘Spain?’

I explained that this was supposed to be an Easter pilgrimage, with time for prayer, reflection and meditation … even if I did want to combine it with sunshine and time off, I had no intention of spending it in a high-rise, over-crowded sunny version of Blackpool or Clacton.

I recalled the Monty Python sketch and the fear that I might “sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keep singing ‘Torremolinos, Torremolinos’.”

I was soon convinced of the wrongness of my prejudiced ways. Did I not know about Semana Santa and the processions with crosses and images of the Crucified Christ that take place in most villages and towns, even in the most built-up of areas?

Early on the morning on Maundy Thursday, I was on a flight to Málaga, about to spend a week on the Costa del Sol, in the Torremolinos pilloried over 40 years ago in that Monty Python sketch, staying in the Roc Lago Rojo Hotel in La Carihuela, once a picturesque fishing village on the edge of Torremolinos.

Bringing the sacred into the secular

Bringing the sacred to the secular and inviting the secular into the sacred on the beach in La Carihuela (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
In the narrow streets between the hotel and the beach at La Carihuela, the tiny parish church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, squeezed in between the bars, the cafés and the souvenir shops, offered a warm welcome, so that most of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Day was spent following the local commemorations of Holy Week and Easter.

There was no great street parade there like the famous procession through the streets of Málaga, where confraternities of masked and hooded men carry larger-than-life statues shoulder high in penitence. But the simple foot washing ceremony at the Maundy Eucharist was all the more poignant for involving what may well have been the local butcher, baker and candlestick maker.

On the following morning, local people took it turn to carry the large, life-size image of the Crucified Christ through the streets of La Carihuela, stopping outside bars and cafés or at tiny corners abutted by small hotels and shops, and leading the prayers of the Good Friday Stations of the Cross.

At one stage, the cross was brought down through the sun beds on the beach to the shoreline, where it was raised aloft as the prayers continued. In a simple ceremony with mediaeval roots and modern interpretations, the message of Christ Crucified was being proclaimed to all without discrimination, the sacred was being brought into the secular, and the secular was invited to enter the sacred – an opportunity missed so often in many northern European societies.

The ruins of the Roman amphitheatre are a reminder of Málaga’s classical past (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
Later that afternoon in Málaga, 15 km to the north, we visited the Cathedral, the Roman amphitheatre, the remains of the Moorish Alcazaba or fortress, the Church of Santiago, where Picasso was baptised, and the birthplace of Picasso, which is now a museum and educational foundation, the Fundación Picasso.

Spanish ladies in lace queuing for lunch in Málaga (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
In the cathedral and the churches, many Spanish people were dressed formally as they came to pray quietly. But even the women who dress in formal black, with large, traditional lace headdresses, are “Ladies who Lunch” and they queued for lunch outside the restaurants without any hint of self-consciousness.

‘Music in my soul’

White-washed Mijas is a mountainside village that is like a balcony above the countryside of Andalucía (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
We were reminded that Málaga, which still boasts of its Phoenician and Roman foundations, has roots dating back to classical times, that it was once a central meeting place of the worlds of Islam and Christianity, and that more recently it was the birthplace of one of the greatest figures in the world of Western art.

On Saturday, two of us caught a bus from Torremolinos to Fuengirola, and a second bus up to Mijas, a small town packed each day with day-trippers taking an Easter break from the brash resorts.

Mijas is a white-washed, mountainside village, 30 km south-west of Málaga and about 450 metres (about 1,500 feet) above sea level. The village is like a balcony looking out across the countryside of Andalucía and down onto Fuengirola and the coastal resorts of the Costa del Sol.

Lighting the Paschal Candle in La Carihuela (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
Early on Easter morning, while it was still dark, we left our hotel room and walked through the narrow, silent, deserted streets of La Carihuela to wait on the beach for the sunrise. A few early risers were already jogging along the promenade, and one or two lone shore anglers were walking up and down the shoreline, perhaps hoping to catch some fish for breakfast. But we thought about the women who rose early before dawn to visit the tomb, and the disciples by the shore in Galilee, and how they found that Christ is Risen.

Waiting for the sunrise before dawn on Easter morning (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering are successful in teaching Eliza Doolittle that “the Rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” The truth is, however, very different: Spanish rain falls mainly in the northern mountains. But still, much of our Sunday and all of our Monday were washed out. When we ventured out for a walk on the beach or for a coffee we found how heavy Spanish rain can be, even on the Costa del Sol.

The rain in Spain does not stay mainly in the plain (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
With the Easter celebrations over, we took a two-hour bus journey on Tuesday through the countryside of Andalucía to the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains to visit Granada and Alhambra.

The Spanish composer Andrés Segovia once described Granada as “a place of dreams where the Lord put the seed of music in my soul.”

The buildings and the gardens of Alhambra are designed to reflect the very beauty of Paradise (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
The Alhambra dates from 889, but it eventually fell into disrepair and was damaged by neglect, plunder, earthquakes and even an attempt by Napoleon’s army to blow the place up. It was almost forgotten until it was romanticised in 1832 by Washington Irving (1783-1859) in his Tales of the Alhambra. The new attention brought restoration, so that today this is one of Spain’s major tourist attractions and a Unesco World Heritage Site.

The Palace of Alhambra is a reminder of almost eight centuries of Islamic presence (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

The Lion Fountain at the heart of Alhambra (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
The buildings and the gardens of Alhambra are designed to reflect the very beauty of Paradise, with gardens, fountains, streams, a palace, and a mosque, all within an imposing fortress wall, flanked by 13 massive towers. We strolled through the gardens, the secluded courtyards, gardens, patios and villas where the sultans of Granada could escape from the place intrigues and politics in their search for tranquility.

The Palace of Alhambra, with its creative architectural combination of space, light, water and decoration, is one of the most intriguing works left behind in Spain after almost eight centuries of Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula.

Flamenco buskers in a square in Granada … Andrés Segovia said Granada is “where the Lord put the seed of music in my soul.” (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Walking through the narrow streets of Granada (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
Later in the week, we experienced another intriguing presence in Spain when we visited Gibraltar. But Gibraltar is a story for another day.

The Spanish countryside below the Sierra Nevada mountains (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
We found plenty of time for walks on the beach, and found it takes little time to learn to enjoy Spanish food and wine. We never got to see Seville or Cordoba, nor did we explore the possibility of crossing to Morocco. But after a week, some of that spoken Spanish I had learned 45 to 50 years ago was beginning to come back ... sometimes at unexpected moments. And I realised there is more to Spain than sun, sand, sea and sangria.

There is more to Spain than sun, sand, sea and sangria (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)
Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism, Liturgy and Church History, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This essay and these photographs were first published in June 2014 in the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough) and the Diocesan Magazine (Cashel, Ferns and Ossory).

An afternoon walking through the ‘white village’ of Mijas

The white-washed narrow streets of Mijas, with their geranium-filled hanging baskets, seem to be a world apart from the resorts on the Costa del Sol below (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Patrick Comerford

Mijas is a white-washed, mountainside village, 30 km south-west of Málaga and about 450 metres (about 1,500 feet) above sea level. The village is like a balcony looking out across the countryside of Andalusia and down onto Fuengirola below and the coastal resorts of the Costa del Sol.

Two of us caught a bus from Torremolinos to Fiengirola late one morning, and from there took a second bus up to Mijas, a small town packed each day with day-trippers taking an Easter break from the brash resorts.

Mihas is like a balcony above the surrounding countryside and the resorts of the Costa del Sol (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Mijas relies on the tourist industry, and the town is filled with cafés, restaurants, museums and souvenir shops.

The Hermitage of San Sebastián has a tiny chapel that dates from the late 17th century, when it was built with alms. This is a typical Mudejar church, built in a Spanish architectural style dating from the 13th to the 16th century, and combining Moorish and Gothic styles. Inside, a peaceful atmosphere is created by that plain white walls that provide a sharp contrast with the ornate altar and cupola above it, decorated with rococo plaster.

An invitation to enter the Secret Garden at the Aroma Café (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Mijas has managed to retain much of its “white village” charm, with its cobbled, narrow winding streets, dazzling whitewashed walls, charming plazas and squares, and breathtaking views.

The street where it stands, Calle San Sebastián, is one of the most beautiful and picturesque along the Costa del Sol.

There we had lunch in the Aroma Café and Secret Garden before continuing to explore the side streets with their white-washed houses, decorated with geranium-filled pots and hanging baskets.

The first settlers in Mijas in prehistoric times were the Tartessians. The remains of the original fortifications can still be seen in parts of the wall. The area’s mineral wealth of the area attracted the Greeks and the Phoenicians to the village, and Mijas was described by Ptolemy in his Geography in the 2nd century AD.

The Romans knew Mijas as Tamisa. They were followed by the Visigoths and then by the Moors, who were ruling this part of southern Spain by the year 714. The Muslim rulers allowed the people here to hold onto their property, their religion, and their customs – but at a price: a third of their goods, agricultural produce and livestock. The Moors pronounced the name Tamisa as Mixa, and this in turn became Mijas.

Lions on a fountain in a square in Mijas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

During the time of the Emirate of Córdoba, the village was conquered by Umar ibn Hafsun. The village remained under the rule of Bobastro, who was defeated by Abd al-Rahman III in the late 9th century.

In 1487, Mijas resisted the advance the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella during the siege of Málaga. But when Málaga fell, the inhabitants surrendered, most of the people were sold as slaves, and the town was repopulated by Christians.

A few decades later, during the Revolt of the Comuneros, Mijas remained loyal to the Spanish monarchs, who gave it the title of Muy Leal (“Very Loyal”). Soon after, Joanna of Castile gave the place the title and status of a royal borough villa (town) and exempted the place from paying royal taxes.

But none of this saved Mijas from the marauding adventures of pirates, who continued to work along the coast below until the early 19th century.

The people of Mijas continued to survive mainly through farming, fishing, and their vineyards. But the pirates threatened the safety of the fishermen, and in the mid-19th century the Philloxera plague destroyed all the local vineyards.

The local peace was also disturbed in 1831, when General Torrijos landed on a beach below at El Charcón. With a small force of 52 men, he crossed Mijas, climbed the hill the hill above and took a stand against the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. The revolt eventually collapsed, and the general and his tiny force were shot on the San Andres beaches on 11 December 1831.

The village remained isolated well into the 20th century, and there was no ’phone service even into the 1950s, when the first small hotel was built.

Today, the attractions for day-trippers to Mijas Pueblo include the town’s traditional bullring, which opened in 1900, and donkey trips that offer children – and some adults – tours around the area. Although the viewing platforms around the rim of Mijas offer spectacular views of the African coastline, the Atlas Mountains, Gibraltar and a good part of the Costa del Sol, cloud cover worked against taking in these sights during my afternoon visit.

La Iglesia de la Immaculada Concepcion … stands on part of the ruins of the Moorish mosque (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Near the bullring, I visited the Iglesia de la Immaculada Concepcion, a church that dates mainly from the early 18th century church but standing on part of the ruins of a Moorish castle that stood here from the 8th until the late 15th century. The original church was built on the site of a mosque in the 1500s, and there are still traces of the Mudejar tower of the old mosque.

A wedding party of three in Mijas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Later as we sipped coffee in a café in a small square, children passed by on “donkey taxis,” and a newly-wed bride in her white costume sat at the table next to us with her husband and their photographer … a wedding party of three.

On the way back to Mijas to Torremolinos, we caught a bus that by-passed Fuengirola, but that took us through Benalmádena, and by the the largest Buddhist stupa in the West, standing tall at 33 metres, with a Tibetan meditation hall beside it.

Some historians say the name of the town comes from the Arabic Ibn al-ma’ din or “son of the mines” for the iron and ochre bed found in the area. Others say it comes from the Arabic word Bina al-ma’din, “the construction or building of the mine.” And others still suggest derivation from Arabic phrases meaning “people between springs” (Bena-A La Ena) or Bina al-Madina, “the state of al-Madina’s family,” referring to a rich Muslim family in Málaga who owned the area.

However, as the bus made its way through the brash areas of the resort, the most prominent names that afternoon appeared to be those on Irish pubs, including ‘The Irish Times’ (I kid you not), ‘Kitty O’Sheas’ and ‘O’Driscolls.’ Who is going to explain this invasion and untangle the etymology of these names for future generations?

A sign of the Times? One of the many Irish pubs in Benalmádena (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

A traditional Good Friday in a resort on the Costa del Sol

The Good Friday procession stands on the shoreline in La Carihuela (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Patrick Comerford

I am spending the Easter weekend in Spain, experiencing the Spanish traditions of the Easter celebrations. While I am here, I am staying in the Roc Lago Rojo Hotel in La Carihuela, once a picturesque fishing village on the edges of Torremolinos, outside Málaga.

The hotel is a traditional beachfront hotel, only 50 metres from the sandy beach of La Carihuela, which is almost 2 km long and stretches as far as the Benalmádena Leisure Port.

Torremolinos was a Spanish fishing village until the 1950s, when it began to develop as one the first resorts on the Costa del Sol. La Carihuela was once a traditional fishing village but only a few nooks and crannies from the old quarter remain as reminders of the area’s former identity. Today it is a popular resort with all the shops, bars, restaurants and amenities found in any popular Mediterranean resort.

On the evening Maundy Thursday [17 April 2014], two of us attended the Eucharist in the local Roman Catholic parish church, a Carmelite church dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

We were back in the church on the morning of Good Friday [18 April 2014], we were back in the church to follow the stations of the cross through La Carihuela, as local people carried a large, life-size cross with an image of the Crucified Christ through the streets of the resort.

It was interesting that in this overwhelmingly Catholic part of Spain, women played as much a part as men in carrying the Cross through the streets, bearing the large candle sticks and carrying the incense in the procession.

We stopped at different junctions, landmark bars and restaurants, and walked along the seaside promenade, as shopkeepers stood reverently in their doorways, and tourists watched from tables outside the cafés or as they made their way along the seafront.

At one stage, the procession made its way down onto the beach, where the procession leaders, with candles and a purple-covered cross, stopped at the edge of the water, procession and titled up the Cross with the image of the Crucified Christ.

It was an opportunity to proclaim Christ Crucified, and to bring the sacred into the secular, to make the secular sacred, an opportunity that is missed so often in many northern European societies.

Later in the afternoon, we caught the local train into Málaga, 15 km to the north, where we visited:

● the Cathedral – known as La Manquita (“the one-armed”) because one of its two towers has never been completed;

● the Roman Amphitheatre;

● the vast Alcazaba, built on the site of a Roman fortress in the 8th-11th centuries as part of the city’s ramparts and defences when Málaga was the principal port of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada.

● the Church of Santiago, where Picasso was baptised and where the local Russian Orthodox community were guests, marking Good Friday too, with an Orthodox epitaphios in front of the altar;

● Picasso’s birthplace, now a museum and home to the Fundación Picasso.

Spanish ladies in lace queuing outside a restaurant in Málaga on Good Friday (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Through the streets of Málaga they were taking down the chairs and viewing platforms that had been in place for the procession of the statues on Thursday evening. In the cathedral and the churches, many Spanish people were dressed formally as they came to pray quietly.

But even the women who dress in formal black, with large, traditional lace headdresses are “Ladies who Lunch” and queued without any hint of self-consciousness outside the restaurants for lunch.

We were back in La Carihuela in time for the Good Friday Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified Eucharist in the small church around the corner from the hotel.

Cabaret ‘every Thursday night’ and singing ‘Torremolinos, Torremolinos’

Patrick Comerford

Do you recall this monologue?:

“Yes, I quite agree with you, I mean, what’s the point of being treated like a sheep? I mean, I’m fed up going abroad and being treated like sheep. What’s the point of being carted around in buses, surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea, ‘Oh, they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home,’ stopping at Majorcan bodegas, selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy, raw, swollen, purulent flesh ‘cause they ‘overdid it on the first day,’ and being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Bontinentals with their international luxury modern roomettes and their Watney’s Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into the queues and, if you’re not at your table, spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there’s bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some big, fat, bloated tart with her hair Brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners, and then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel, and then, once a week, there’s an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin’ Watney’s Red Barrel, and then one night they take you to a local restaurant with local colour and colouring and they show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keeps singing ‘Torremolinos, Torremolinos’ and complaining about the food, ‘Oh, it’s so greasy, isn’t it?’, and then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr Scholl sandals and Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres, and sending tinted postcards of places they don’t know they haven’t visited, ‘To all at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an ‘X’. Wish you were here. Food very greasy but we have managed to find this marvellous little place hidden away in the back streets where you can even get Watney’s Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays “Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner”,’ and spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried Watney’s sandwiches and you can’t even get a drink of Watney’s Red Barrel because you’re still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you’re thirsty and there’s nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it’ll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of ‘unforeseen difficulties,’ i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris – and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody’s swallowing “enterovioform” and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn’t there to take you to the hotel that hasn’t yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there’s no water in the pool, there’s no water in the taps, there’s no water in the bog and there’s only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can’t sleep anyway because of the permanent 24-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door – and you’re plagued by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers’ wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe, and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting 16-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under 19 who doesn’t like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone’s comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free ‘cigarillos’ and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on ‘Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich’ and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody’s talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane.”

Well, that’s a Monty Python mouthful. If you remember this sketch from 1972, you’re the same generation as I am.

I know it’s no longer politically correct, but it remains a classic of British television comedy after so many years. It’s up there with the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Dead Parrot.

And, well, I’m in Torremlinos this week, nor for the Watney’s Red Barrel, last Tuesday’s Daily Express, or cabaret ‘every Thursday night,’ but to experience the climax of Lent, Semana Santa (Holy Week), which began on Palm Sunday (13 April 2014) and continues until Easter Day (20 April).

During this week, the streets of cities, town and resorts in this part of Spain, including Seville and Malaga, are filled with thousands of mediaeval robed and hooded figures, processing slowly behind swaying life-sized religious effigies, accompanied by the deep thud of drums and mournful wailing of trumpets in one of Spain’s largest festivals.

These ancient, sombre commemorations of Christ’s last days are marked by pageantry and emotion that reveal a mystical side of life in Spain, even in vibrant and cosmopolitan cities and resorts, especially at dusk, when candles are lit, and the processions take on a haunting, timeless feel.

Up to a million visitors flock to Seville alone for the spectacle; and the late-night processions this evening (17 April), known as las Madrugas, are said to be unmissable.

The cofradias or church brotherhoods, many dating from the 16th century, take part, each with its own statues of the Virgin Mary and Christ, as well as colourful misterios or tableaux of Bible scenes, carried about on elaborately-decorated pasos or floats.

The nazarenos or robed and hooded penitents carrying crosses, wear hoods, tunics and belts in the special colours of their cofradia. The capirotes or tall, pointed hoods with eye-holes, are designed so those who wear them can repent in anonymity, without being recognised as self-confessed sinners.

Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are national holidays in Spain.

In Seville, the climax of this week is reached early tomorrow morning on Good Friday (18 April), with the appearance of the city’s two favourite and rival Virgin Marys, Triana and Macarena.

In Malaga, Semana Santa is also a very special affair, with the brotherhoods of the city sending floats and large thrones out onto the streets, and candle-lit processions that followed by thousands of spectators.

There are even traditional Semana Santa pastries and nazareno-shaped sweets and chocolates.

This is my first time in Spain, apart from a brief city break in Madrid five years ago in May 2009. So there is a lot to look forward to over the next few days.