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Incredibly strange parties there are in Spain to give and take. And in summer, with the multiplication of patron saint parties And typical of each town, they are increasing. However, those of Santa Cruz de La Palma They are not strange because of their aesthetics and development, but also because of their frequency: the dance of the dwarves is celebrated every five years … but it was not seen ten.
Dwarves to accompany the Virgin. With a denomination that has already been outdated but that, obviously, is still used by tradition, the dance of the dwarves has viralized in social networks by its comic visual spectacularity. This is the most famous number of the traditional parties of the descent of the Virgen de las Nieves, which takes place in the Canarian town of Santa Cruz, in La Palma. In these parties the image of the Virgen de las Nieves moves from her sanctuary in the mountain to the city on the coast. A series of popular acts are celebrated around the act, including dance.
How dwarves dance. The image of the dwarves dancers (in reality, people of average height hidden after huge Napoleonic tricorn) has become popular so much that it has become a symbol of the entire island of La Palma. The music that dance is a polka composed in 1925 by Domingo Santos Rodríguez, and that lasts more than ten minutes. Then the dance is repeated again and again, between parade and dances in different places. This year they have come to be dancing for thirteen hours without stopping.
Lustral dances. The feasts of the Virgin’s descent take place every five years, but the descent and dance of the dwarves had been held for a decade, since it coincided in the previous edition with the pandemic. Therefore, this year the reunion with the 24 dwarves has been special: since it is a show especially aimed at children, to whom the dwarves scare and increase in the parade, for many of them it was the first time they saw them. This year the celebration has recovered an element that was not done since 1925: before its transformation into dwarves the dancers appear dresses as kings. It has also been the first time that two women dance as dwarves.
Viral dance. The ten -year waiting generated considerable expectation in networks, which has set in figures never seen before in the celebration. In Tiktok videos were published with the label #Dwarves2025with thousands of visualizations and comments. On Instagram, only online broadcast had more than 340,000 visualizations. Canarian public television also made intensive use of social networks, which exponentially increased scope and visibility of the event this year.
Disturbing dwarves. The mystical component of the dwarves and the magical element of the narrative of the act (with the kings metamorphicing in dancers) sister this holiday with those of other locations where the macabre and the mysterious also prevail. For example, the Vijanera de Silió, in which 75 symbolic and pre -Christian characters represent ancestral forces in conflict; or the pilgrimage of Santa Marta de Ribarteme, in As Neves, where people who have survived a disease parade in coffins carried by relatives, as offering to the Virgin.
In the Spanish parties we have abundance of monstrous cryoatures at our parties: the Castrillo Colacho of Murcia in Burgos, for example, is a demonic character of grotesque face and yellow and red suit, and jumps on babies placed in mattresses in full street during the eighth of the Corpus. And the piornal jarmplas is a character disguised with a cornuda mask and multicolored ribbons that becomes white from collective anger, with neighbors throwing tons of turnips, in an experience between the carnivals and the terrifying. Next to this, some chotescos heads that dance polkas are a children’s game.
Header | Santa Cruz de la Palma City Council – Carlos Acieg
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