For Madrid’s grandest festival, admission is free. But there’s a floral badge to belong.
Suited out, chulapos and chulapas step lively.
Photo: Menkes
How does a sodbuster become a saint? Like anyone else: with miracles and the pullies of culture.
Isidro de Merlo y Quintana (1070 -1130) more than qualified. Supernatural accountants attribute 438 miracles to the Spanish farmer. Two of his most renowned: praying so ardently that a spring gushed from the dry prairie and outworking every farmhand in the region, with two angels plowing alongside him….
As for cultural credentials, Pope Gregory XV elevated Isidro to sainthood in the all-star canonization of 1622, with heavyweights Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Philip Neri.
Even so, Madrid beat the Pope to the punch: Isidro was already the city’s holy patron.
Greater Madrid is now home to more than six million people. And though much of Isidro’s cropland has been paved over for centuries, this rural saint’s feast day, May 15, is the Spanish capital’s boldest celebration of the year. Wildly diverse in its attractions and its crowds, the festival oddly revolves around a floral axis: the red carnation.
”El clavel” is ubiquitous. It pops from ladies’ headscarves and guy’s lapels. For at least the last several decades, it’s been the poster-child of the event, literally. Jaime Agulló designed this classic for 1973. A black cat wears the traditional costume of a castizo (pure-bred Madrilenian): the tweed cap, white scarf and red carnation boutonniere. Whether you’re truly a gato (cat) whose grandparents and parents were all born in the city or a recent arrival from Cartageña, an immigrant from Bogotá or a tourist from Stuttgart, here’s your outfit for the festival.
It makes a kind of sense for a flower to represent the saint of farmworkers, though today Spanish carnations are principally grown not around Madrid but in Cadiz, Murcia, and Aragon. Of course, Isidro was growing not flowers but grain. Still, there are loads of civic boosters, florists certainly , who insist that the carnation is deeply rooted in the heart of every hard-core madrileño (fondly known as chulapos and chulapas). El clavel is the must-have accessory for proud native and wanna-be alike.
The red carnation does speak to the notoriously brazen quality of the chulapo. It shouts for attention: the brightest, spiciest, most long-lasting (and least expensive) of all flowers — those very same attributes that have put off floral snobs for the last 40 years.
“Carnations! Anything but….”
Prone to such affectations, as we all are, Madrid grows inevitably more like every other big city. It’s been a long time coming. Consider this from the great novelist Benito Pérez Galdós in the 1880s:
The faster galleys were bringing the latest Parisian fashions to Madrid with ever-greater speed, and there were signs of the slow and tyrannical invasion of muted colors, which purport to be a sign of culture. Spanish society was beginning to pride itself on being “serious”; that is, on dressing somberly, and the cheerful reign of bright colors was undeniably crumbling. Just as the red capes had gone, so too did the Manila scarves. The aristocracy ceded them with disdain to the middle class, and the middle class, which also wanted to be aristocratic, handed them over to the people, the last and faithful adherents of vivid hues. That enchantment of the eyes, that marvel of color, an imitation of nature smiling, lit by the midday sun, began to lose ground, though the people, with the instinct of a colorist and poet, defended the Spanish garment as they defended Monteleón Park and the strongholds of Zaragoza.
– Fortunata and Jacinta, 1887
In this same spirit of defiance, red carnations today push back against global conformity as their own rigid uniform. Women put back on the tight skirts and bright “Manila” shawls that Galdós cherished, and metropolitan “seriousness” gives way, for a few spring days at least. Anybody so inclined can be “the people.”
These get-ups and emblems of San Isidro’s festival are “invented traditions,” a term coined by British author Eric Hobsbawm. They claim a continuity with the past that’s “largely factitious,” but inflexible, even strangely dictatorial (a term not to be taken lightly in Spain). At San Isidro, nearly everyone is dressed alike. As for the insistent carnations, they’ve been contorted further into a ridiculous “code”: two red carnations = the lady’s married; two white ones = she’s single; one red and one white = she’s engaged; two red and one white = she a widow….
Who can keep track and who cares when there are rosquillas to be eaten and bullfights to protest?
Festival crowds (flowerless) in 1913 relax on the pradera awaiting the romeria (pilgrimage walk) to San Isidro’s shrine.
Photo: Archivos de la Comunidad de Madrid.
Looking at late 19th and early 20th century photos of San Isidro festivities, there’s not one flower of any kind to be seen. People lounge on the pradera or browse the pottery stalls in the Plaza de las Salesas. We see people in everyday clothes, and the only dancing going on appears to be staged by a few schoolchildren.
Today there’s a vast array of entertainments that ripple from the Jardin de Vistillas south of city center to the hub of Puerta del Sol: VVV Trippin’s “Radical electronic music” competes with scores of other performers. There are car shows, holy Mass, magic acts, and of course fireworks. Wending through it all, chulapos-and-chulapas-for-a-day in their white headscarves and tweed caps all wear carnations, perhaps on their way to a workshop in the Chotis.
This is the festival’s traditional dance, if by “traditional” we might again mean de rigor. The trend, now dance orthodoxy, was inspired by a popular 1946 Chotis-style song “Madrid” by Agustín Lara.
The city’s unofficial anthem, it begins
Cuando llegues a Madrid, chulona mía
Voy a hacerte emperatriz de Lavapies;
Y alfombrarte con claveles la Gran Vía
Y a bañarte con vinillo de JerezWhen you get to Madrid, my darling,
I’ll make you the empress of Lavapiés;
And carpet the Gran Vía with carnations
And bathe you in sherry.
Now that the workingclass neighborhoods of Madrid have given way to gentrification and the castizo (pure-bred) culture of Madrid is diluted – some would say, amended — by international immigrants; now that religious devotions are drowned by tourism, and even the chulapo uniform itself is tweaked in a special fashion show of recycled-fabrics — reaching for some vestige of authenticity, real or fantasized, is an entirely sympathetic reflex.
As for the red carnation, first extolled by composer Agustín Lara and now everywhere, it’s delicious to note that Lara was from Veracruz, Mexico. He had never set foot in Spain when he wrote his danceable “Madrid.”
How fitting that in this most acogeder (welcoming) of all European capitals, all it takes is a bright red flower to make anyone madrileño.
Chalk up another miracle to San Isidro.
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