Imagine that over half of your town goes on a camping trip together, but instead of driving in your car, everyone either walks or rides on a trailer pulled by horse or tractor. All family groups bring their own tent trailer (also pulled by tractor) and packs lots of food and drink. During the entire trek everyone is dressing up in festive clothing. If you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ like I am this reminded me a lot of youth groups leaving to go on pioneer trek except it would be an entire Stake doing it all at the same time.
The celebration of The Virgen of Rocio (Another name for the Virgen Mary) is a Camino or Pilgrimage to the town of Rocio to celebrate the Virgen Mary. From what I can get from it it really is just one HUGE party. Rocio the town is usually population 23,000. During this time over a million people come and stay. Almost all of them walk or ride on carts and they come from all over the place. Our small Town of Chucena is pretty close to Rocio (about a half hour drive in the car) so it only takes a day and a half to walk their. For other groups that come they walk for 12 or 13 days to get to there.
Anyway, most our friends and neighbors went so the town was sort of a ghost town all weekend. It just so happened that Steven was not here for the event because he was in Barcelona all week attending a conference for work. A lot of people asked if we were going to go to Rocio but there was no way I was going to take our 6 children by myself to Rocio so we just watched and supported our friends on their way out.
As you can see in the pictures there was just a huge line up of carts and campers, trailers and buggies. It was so much fun to see!
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