Día de la Hispanidad

Parades are usually pretty cool. I have been in quite a few with my high school and college bands, but the parade on the Paseo de Castellana in Madrid was a beautiful sight indeed.

As you can see in the picture, there were many people and plenty of pomp and circumstance. This is the Royal Guard surrounding the King of Spain and the Prince and Princess. The influence of Roman heritage on military tradition is very clear. Notice the headgear and plummage of the horsemen, very traditional indeed.

Before the procession started, there was an entire military review. I participated in a few of these myself, and it's basically standing around for 2 hours to perform 2 minutes of action. It was still interesting to see it happen in another country.

This holiday has different meanings throughout Spain according to my Spanish roommate from Valencia. Spain is not homogenous throughout the country, there's the Basques, Catalans, and Galicians working for more or total autonomy (in the case of the Basques and Catalans) from Madrid. So the 12 October festival represents different things in those respective areas. I'll leave it at that as I can't claim any significant understanding of the history of all this. I do know that under Franco, use of non-Spanish languages and regional autonomy was suppressed very strongly.

At any rate, people seemed very supportive of the military and especially the King. I can't say I saw the same for Mr. Zapatero, the Prime Minister.

Stay tuned and keep checking back. There's plenty more to come.

r_m