Today was the first day of Corpus Christi. It began with a procession, which I wrote about in a separate blog entry. Tonight was the opening day fireworks. There will be fireworks and castles every night for seven days. Fireworks in Cuenca are nothing like in the States, where you must keep a “safe distance.” Here you can get as close as you want. Fireworks explode overhead, with sparks streaming down on you. I made the mistake of wearing a nylon down jacket last year, and it was destroyed by those falling sparks. I now always wear an inexpensive cotton jacket when going to these events!
We’ll talk a bit more about “castles” further down, but the above photo shows one such castle. The man has stepped about 2 feet in front of this fireworks-laden structure and asked for his picture to be taken by a friend. I am standing no more than four feet from him, so maybe six feet from the structure myself, while taking a series of photographs. You can see how the sparks hit his head and bounce off, as they are doing on the ground. When this structure was burned out, my jacket and camera were filled with white “fireworks corpses!” 🙂
The fireworks and castles are set off at irregular intervals, based on nothing more than the person with the match deciding “this is a good time.” There is the needed time to construct the castles — bamboo structures with four or five levels of fireworks — but other fireworks go off almost at random. The audience is patient though, and hundreds crowd the square waiting for the next ignition.
When the fireworks start, they only last a few seconds. A minute is a rather long burst. However, these bursts continue until nearly midnight at random intervals. Again, the timing is no more than the guy with the match deciding he wants to launch one now. After we got home, the fireworks continued off and on, so I put my camera in our living room window, and shot the two images above where the church domes can also be seen. For the others, I was pointing straight up, then dropping the lens quickly so the lens would not be covered in falling sparks.
The castles are the fireworks highlight, and what draws us to the park, instead of just sitting in our warm home and watching from the window. Some builders will have the entire castle fire at once, while others fire one level at a time, to stretch out how long the structure lasts. They have fountains, spinners, whistlers, and are fun to stand a couple feet from and watch the world explode around you!