After spending the day in Los Naveros at the horse feria there, I thought I knew everything about how this whole feria thing works. But I was completely wrong. As could be expected, since Jerez de la Frontera has more than 200,000 people, the feria here was much larger than that in Los Naveros. But this was the complete opposite extreme as far as I could tell. The streets of Jerez are wide, and they were lined with booth after booth of restaurants serving tapas and sherry. Everyone was dressed in their finest flamenco dresses and the men were boasting their full vaquero show attire.
In the show arena, men were showing their horses. In hand, you could see yearlings all the way up to aged stallions. You could watch as one man on one beautiful black stallion navigated 12 spotless white mares without so much as a rope connecting them. You could watch full doma vaquera competitions, classical dressage, foals being shown at their mother’s sides. It was amazing. We watched Antonio show a yearling owned by one of our friends Paco. I wandered aisle after aisle of tiny baby horses, some looking like they were no more than a couple weeks old.
Outside of the main show arena, crowding the streets were thousands of Spaniards ready for a good party. Even though it was early in the day, the bars were packed and the streets overflowing with group after group of all ages of people swaying, singing, dancing and drinking. Then there were the horses, some organized, some not. There were carriages for hire with up to ten horses dressed in full regalia with bells, pom poms and giant headdresses carrying people up and down the streets. There were hundreds of free standing horses, ridden by mostly men and children (some of whom looked as young as 3 and 4).
Dispersed in between the hundreds of horses were the parades of flamenco dancers. Twenty or thirty women would walk arm in arm dressed from head to toe in fancy flamenco costumes inclusive of head pieces, bright makeup and matching high heeled shoes. Every 50 or so yards, one of the matriarchs in the group would begin a song and most of the group would start to dance. Sometimes it was organized, with a few girls dancing in the Sevillana in the middle of a circle, but more often than that, it was just a few women dancing and everyone singing and cheering in unison. Each group had at least a couple girls in strollers (but still dressed as lavishly as the rest) and each group had at least one woman who looked like if she took another step she may keel over. We’re talking hunchback grandma Maria who looked about 95.
And the party didn’t stop. We arrived in Jerez around 9 AM and when we did, there were people who were just going home from the night before. The word fiesta should not be taken lightly here.