Trip Tips: Venezuelan Festival Calendar 2010

If you want to plan a visit to venezuela, the first thing you need to know is when the public holidays fall.

There's no point visiting during the main holidays of Christmas, Easter or Carnival unless you specifically want to see one of the many local festivals that take place during these times or if you're one of those people who feels lonely without a horde of people to keep them company on the beach.

Venezuelans love their holidays and will do anything to extend them, so carnival celebrations won't start this year on Monday, 15 February, but on Friday, 12 February, or the Thursday before that and will most likely extend beyond that in most places to Ash Wednesday on the 17th.

This is something the Venezuelans call a "puente", literally a bridge, a neat way of stretching holidays out between weekends to maximize the party time available.

The same holds true for other moveable feast such as Easter (Semana Santa in Spanish), which officially starts on Good Friday on 2 April and runs through Easter Monday on 5 April. Expect the celebrations to start well before Friday and extend well beyond Monday.

1 January - New Year's Day
6 January -The Three Kings (Reyes Magos)
15-16 February - Carnival
19 March - San Jose
28 March -Palm Sunday - Los Palmeros descend from the Avila mountain with palm fronds for a mass in the local church in the plaza in Chacao, Caracas.
1-4 April - Easter (Semana Santa)
19 April - Declaration of Independence
1 May - International Workers Day
3 June - Corpus Christi - Devil Dancers start the celebrations early on Thursday in San Francisco de Yare, Chuao, Patanemo and 11 other towns.
23-24 June - Feast of Saint John the Baptist has a party atmosphere along the coast, where statues of the saint are taken out of the churches to dance to Afro-Venezuelan drumming.
24 June - Battle of Carabobo. The decisive battle in Venezuela's war of independence against Spanish control is celebrated with military parades.
29 June - San Pedro and San Pablo
5 July - Venezuelan Independence
24 July - Simon Bolivar's Birthday
12 October - Indigenous Resistance Day, a public holiday formerly known as Columbus Day. It is also the biggest day for the Cult of Maria Lionza, with thousands of her devotees travelling to the Mountain of Sorte in Yaracuy State to bathe in the river, take part in cleansing rituals and watch the mass fire walking ceremony that closes the day.
7 December - Immaculate Conception
25 December - Christmas Day

How the Yare Devils Got Their Red Threads

1948 – The Year of the Dancing Devil

In December 1947, in a landslide victory, novelist Romulo Gallegos became Venezuela’s first democratically-elected president. To celebrate his inauguration in February 1948, poet Juan Liscano came up with the idea of a mounting an ambitious spectacle in Caracas that would bring together the most important folk traditions in the country.

The two-hour show, held in the Nuevo Circo bullring in the centre of Caracas, was called "A Festival of Tradition: Songs and Dances of Venezuela."

More than 500 dancers, singers and musicians were brought to the capital by plane, bus, boat and mule.

For the first time, Guajiro Indians from the deserts of Zulia State were to perform their sacred dances alongside Afro-Venezuelan drummers from the Caribbean coast.

And there was more: foot-stomping Joropos from the Llanos, Chimbangueles in honour of the black saint San Benito, and the Dancing Devils of San Francisco de Yare.

The Red Devils

At first Liscano couldn’t get the Devils of Yare to attend: "I convinced them with the argument that we were doing this festival to show the foreigners that were coming that the Devils of San Francisco de Yare knew how to dance, something which they doubted."

More significantly, Education Minister Luis Beltran Pietro Figueroa, sent yards of red material so that the Devils could make new costumes for the event.

So this was the first time in their history that the Yare Devils were all dressed in red. Before that, the arreadores (in charge of keeping order) and the cajeros (drummers) would have worn white suits and the other devils would have made do with bright outfits made from colourful patches taken from old clothes.

But it wasn’t going to be easy for Liscano to get the Devils to perform.

Two days by mule

Nowadays it takes just over an hour to drive the 78 km from Caracas to Yare but for the 35 members of Yare's Devil Dancing Society who made the trip in 1948 it took two days by mule. This was the first time any of them had been away from home and when they arrived some of them had second thoughts.

The Devils had only ever danced on the Feast of Corpus Christi and were wary of performing without the usual preparations: attending mass and having their masks blessed by the local priest.

To convince them Liscano had to arrange for them to attend a morning mass every day they were expected to rehearse and performing. But he forgot to get permission from the mayor’s office.

The members of the cofradia went to their first mass in Caracas in a church in El Valle, and they came dressed for Corpus Christi in their full devil-dancing regalia. As the priest held aloft the Holy Sacrament they took their cue and began a frenetic dance in the entrance of the church.

The noise of the drums and maracas was so loud that it brought the local police, who promptly arrested the Devils for disturbing the peace and wearing masks outside of Carnival. Fortunately, they were soon released.

They do like to be beside the seaside

The Devils had another request for Liscano: "…one day they came to tell me of their greatest desire: to see the sea before returning to their home town."

It’s hard to understand the isolation of small towns like Yare back in 1948, but none of the Devils' had ever seen the sea before, and their bus trip to Macuto, on the central coast, was a revelation.

Liscano writes in his book Sacred Fires: "… when they discovered that great blue stain, under a wide, cloudless sky, they were seized with a kind of ecstasy, a profound feeling of respect for majestic Mother Nature who had made such beautiful things."

"… they entered the water in silence, in a state of reverie, and some of them plunged their hands into the water in a sort of ritual gesture."

The end of the festival, the start of their fame

The Festival of Tradition was a huge success. So many people turned up on the opening night that it had to be extended for four more nights. In total 25,000 people watched the show.

It was an event the like of which Venezuela had never seen and was never to see again.

The party was soon over for Romulo Gallegos too, on 24 November 1948 he was ousted in a military coup and forced into exile for the next ten years.

For the Dancing Devils of Yare, however, it was just the beginning. Soon, the annual Corpus Christi celebrations in Yare would become one more attraction for tourists to visit, like the mountains of Merida, the spectacular Angel Falls and the blue Caribbean waters that had so captivated the Devils.

By Russell Maddicks

Click here for an article on the Dancing Devils of Yare in literature

Click here for a video of the Dancing Devils in the cacao plantation of Chuao

The Dancing Devils of Yare in literature

In 2008 the moveable feast of Corpus Christi falls on 22 May. On that day Devil Dancers in San Francisco de Yare in the Tuy Valley will don their horned masks and red outfits and dance outside the church to pay a promise. The tradition harks back to the conquest and Spanish traditions transplanted to the New World. African slaves found in this day of the devil an opportunity to transcend their status at the bottom rung of society, to take control of the streets, and to challenge the church. Not surprisingly, several authors have found inspiration in this unique expression of Venezuelan folk culture. The photos are by Edmundo "El Gordo" Perez, who visited Yare in 1948.

By Russell Maddicks

The first person to bring the Diablos Danzantes de Yare to a national and international audience was Venezuela’s most celebrated novelist, Romulo Gallegos (1884-1969), the author of “Doña Barbara”, “Canaima” and “Cantaclaro”.

Gallegos describes the Corpus Christi celebrations of Yare in a chapter entitled: “Diablos y Angelitos” from his 1937 novel “Pobre Negro” (“Poor Negro”). The book is set during the bloody Federal Wars that ravaged the country between 1859 and 1863 and is an excellent example of Gallegos’ ability to weave regional traditions and customs into his narrative:

“But at that moment two rockets went off announcing the arrival of the devils and the crowds rushed like a whirlwind on to the streets to wait for them, while the drummers standing in the porch of the church began the tam-tam that would accompany the dancing.”

“Devils from all over the region had come to pay promises, the majority of them made so that the Corpus Christi fiesta would lack neither the pagan nor the sacred.”

“The devils, red from their horns to their cloth tails, wore colourful adornments and rattles of every kind, as well as some who were draped in silk and bells, which represented a great investment of money..."

"They invaded the entrance to the church... where the Holy Sacrament was on show, just as the sacristan was closing the doors. Then they stretched out, face down, on the brick floor in two parrallel rows, separated by the same width as the big doors, while the drums stopped beating.

"The curveta and mina drums began again. One of the devils got up - the first in the lefthand row - turning a somersault on his hands that left him kneeling with his back to the church door, and then he got up, simulating the convulsive shudder of someone possessed, in order to shake the rattles he was wearing, and began a dance of jumps and swoops of extraordinary agility, pushing back his cloth tail in order to touch it on the wood of the door..."

"One by one... the devils took their turn, trying to repeat what the first had done, but each one making an effort to outdo the others in agility and skill.

"Now all the devils began their dance. The general dance, without rhythm or beat, just a chance to make a noise with the drums, a whirlwind of somersaults, swerves and squats that filled the space outside the church. It was primitive Africa, even though it was reproducing in America a scene from medieval Europe, and possessed by the farce, they now became frenetic...."

The other writer to draw inspiration from the Diablos Danzantes de Yare was the influential Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), who came to Venezuela in 1945 and stayed untilFidel Castro and his band of bearded revolutionaries ousted the dictator Batista in 1959.

His groundbreaking 1953 novel, “Los Paso Perdidos” (“The Lost Steps”), follows a musicologist on a journey to the source of the Orinoco River, which also takes him back to man’s lost cultural origins. Carpentier cleverly juxtaposes the Corpus Christi celebrations in Yare into his narrative in Chapter 3:

“... several devils appeared around a corner of the plaza, headed towards a miserable church of brick and plaster...”

“...they advanced slowly, in little skips, behind a kind of leader or master of ceremonies who could have played the role of Beelzebub in a Passion Play, of the Dragon, or the King of Madmen, with his devil’s mask of three horns and a pig’s snout."

"A kind of fear came over me at the sight of those faceless men... at those masks, out of the mystery of time, perpetuating man’s love of the False Face, the disguise, the pretense of being an animal, a monster or a malign spirit.”

“The strange dancers reached the door of the church and pounded the knocker a number of times. They stood for a long time before the closed door...”

“Then suddenly the double doors were noisily flung open and... the devils fell back in panic, as though seized by a fit, stumbling against one another, falling, rolling to the ground.”

When the solemn Church procession is over, Carpentier writes: “... the devils who were left outside began to run, lauging and leaping, turned from devils into clowns... shouting lewdly through the windows...”



Click here to see Alejo Carpentier's classic novel "The Lost Steps"


Click here for an article on how the Dancing Devils of Yare came to wear their distinctive red outfits

Click here for a video of the Dancing Devils from the famous cacao plantation of Chuao