We left Toledo after breakfast, heading to the town of Lerma, two hours north of Madrid. The town was bustling when we arrived, celebrating the last day of a week-long festival in honor of the feast of the Virgin Mary’s birth. A big mass was just letting out of the Collegiate Church of St. Peter and Priscilla and Grant caught sight of a processional from the church, led by two shawm players. They were modern Spanish shawms with many keys on them, but distinctly like Piffaro’s shawms in their timbre!
The town squares were bustling with festival goers, eating, drinking, dancing. In the late afternoon, we watched a series of contests among local Lerma clubs. In the town bullring, groups of contestants tried their luck at running across and balancing on huge blow-up structures. Most fell off to much hilarity, while the lucky few held on to make it all the way across. We continued to hear the noise of the crowd as we walked around quieter areas of the town in the early evening before dinner (as is the Spanish custom, evening meals are not served until 8:30 at the earliest). We ate a magnificent feast prepared from all-local food and wine in the restaurant of our small hotel. It seemed we were the only guests – everyone else was already dancing in the large square of the Ducal Palace!
At midnight we watched fireworks – the pyrotechnics went off right over the heads of the crowd, and we were all only 50 feet from where they were lit by one guy’s large torch…so much for precaution, but very fun to be right underneath them!
Dancing went on in the large square until 5 in the morning, we were told, although we retired soon after the fireworks.
