Llegar: To Arrive

The apartment is an IKEA showroom—neo-minimalism—living room to kitchen to bedroom to bath. It is enough. White walls and marble floors suggest coolness even as the temperatures begin to climb. Mosquitoes, vestiges of the rainy winter and spring, somehow elude the breezy, net curtains draping the full-length windows that open onto tiny balconies. Sounds visit from windows stationed ear-to-ear, eye-to-eye, dogs barking, flamenco guitar drifting, babies crying; Sevilla is a city, after all.

Home, this month, is the Macarena neighborhood, Sevilla’s SoHo or Austin, stretching out along the Alameda de Hercules, a former stretch of the rio Guadalquivir now paved for pedestrians and sprouting water spouts to cool the air and the pavement. Dogs and naked little children run through the gentle founts; older children fill water balloons and water cannons at public spigots.

Still, it is paradoxical, this barrio of free spirits. The Basilica of the Macarena stands at a refurbished gate into the ancient city, an intact remnant of the city walls stretching to the east and then south.

The Macarena, the Virgin of Hope, lives in the Basilica, zealously guarded by her chartered hermandad (fraternity charged with the Church’s Samaritan work, and the preservation and veneration of the Macarena). Her crystal tears trace a path of sorrow down her polychrome wood face. The museum, adjacent to the 19th-century basilica, showcases the paso (float) on which the Macarena is carried through the streets of Sevilla to the Catedral and back again. Another paso depicts Pontius Pilate pronouncing the death sentence, life-size figures filling this portable diorama of piety, betrayal and admonition.

The hermandad find new vigor in the 20’s and 30’s. One Sr. Rodriguez Ojedo re-envisions the procession to grander heights of theater. New costumes for the processors in the form of Roman soldiers with breastplates, new trousseau for the Macarena, encrusted with hundreds of hours of gold and silver threaded embroidery covering acres of flowing velvet cloaks and gowns.


And, new cloaks and knotted capes for penitents, velvet hoods that cover the face except for the eyes and that tower to a single, sharp point.

Spirit and property of this hermandad (including the Macarena) survive the civil war intact. Nationalism flavors their rhetoric, highlighted by the burial of Franco’s brother in the Basilica itself, an uncommon burial for a common, lay soldier. The penitentes’ hoods offer striking and unsettling reminders of another group dedicated to intolerance.