Feria de Abril – The Seville Fair

There has been an explosion of colour. It is Divali meets Royal Ascot and the Melbourne Cup rolled into one. It is the Feria de Abril, the Seville Spring Fair. Gone are the sober clothes of simple tailored lines so universally adopted. Everywhere there is colour, frills and furbelows. Flamenco dresses and flowers, felt hats and cummerbunds.

There are polka dots and candy stripes lined up at the bus stops, sitting side-saddle on the scooters and swaying through the streets. Three kilometres from the Feria the buses are already heaving and camellias and short jackets wait impatiently as bus after bus sails by.

At the roundabout before the bridge, the taxis snarl with the carriages, police whistles blare and arms wave. We join the crowd stretching like a stick of candy over the bridge and under the arch to the Feria!

Every horse and mule in Andalucía has been press-ganged into service. The stables for miles around are booked out; the manure crop, a gardener’s dream. They have been brushed and clipped and plaited and dressed and harnessed. They are smothered in bells and pom-poms until they can barely see the way in front of them. And they are pulling every type and variety of open carriage that ever was.

Where have all these carriages come from? Where have they been kept for the rest of the sober weeks of the year? They are parading in their hundreds, jostling for space with pedestrians and pushchairs. Shiny black with yellow wheels, but atop them, a seething froth of life, colour and spectacle.

The Feria is all about parties, private parties. Hundreds of booths, ranged like chalets along the seafront, are filled with tables and a dance floor, friends and families gather and the celebration begins. Music, wine, food and good company: the heart of Spanish life, oh, and the chance to show off.

Everyone is taking photos and Facebook has gone into meltdown. They pose: backs straight as a ramrod, head tilted high and that proud, fiery Spanish look in their eyes. A young boy rides by on a thoroughbred fit for a prince. He rides as though he and the horse are one, his body hardly moving: the definition of dignity and pride. The young girls snap each other beside the hedge, flowers amassed in their hair. A child leans into her papa, seated sideways on a pad behind the saddle, her legs are barely long enough to dangle over the horse’s hindquarters.

The music has started and dancers are warming to the task. Elegant arms and bent wrists wind slowly, not professional flamenco, but the homely brand where everyone joins in. It is early yet, the sun is still above the horizon, and as it shades into night, the party continues.

We make our way home across the river to our apartment in the Calle Juzgado, where the only bright colours are the painted pailings of the children’s playground and the music is the sound of the piano two doors down.