Finale of the Feria de las Flores in Colombia is a parade of flower porters.
Desfile de los Silleteros, Medellin, Colombia, August 6, 2006. Photo: El Colombiano.
“¡Qué berraquera!”
” ¡Esto es hermoso!”
“¡Qué viva Antioquia!”
So shouted the crowd in Medellin yesterday at the climax of one of the biggest and lushest flower festivals in the world. The Feria de las Flores wound up with its beloved and dazzling human-floral parade. We’re not talking about 18-wheelers sporting the Flintstones, sponsored by potato-chip manufacturers and ridden by girls suffocating in make-up.
It’s the Desfile de los Silleteros—when men (also women and children, now) carry immense floral decorations on their backs through the streets of Medellin. The desfile custom is rooted in the cut-flower economy of the region: small farmers in the villages around the city pouring into town for market with fresh blooms in wooden frames (the old ones looking a bit like chairs—sillas) strapped to their backs. The market day trek has turned into a pageant of tradition, flowers shaped into immense medallions, some weighing as much as 70 kilos (154 pounds).
This was the 49th silleteros parade, featuring 483 human participants and who knows how many stems of gladioli, carnations, daisies, roses, more.
Silleteritos in the kiddie parade, Feria de las Flores, Medellin, Colombia. Photo: El Colombiano.
See for yourself what Mother Nature and her human children can heft. Here’s a history of the event and more pictures. This year there were 50 “campesinos” with silletas “monumentales,” 260 carrying the traditional ladder-back displays, 50 commercial entries, 40 emblems, 30 kiddie participants, 50 “juniors” and 28 in a new category of “pioneers” —old timers who work on the silletas but aren’t up to carrying them in the procession anymore.
¡Qué vivan los silleteros!
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