La feria de Sevilla desde el punto de vista de una estudiante irlandesa

Hola y feliz feria a tod@s! ¡He pasado una semana ferial fenomenal! Fue mi primera feria de Sevilla entonces hoy quería contaros sobre mi experiencia de este festival desde el punto de vista de una extranjera.

 

The feria was actually one of the main things that drew me to Seville in the first place. In my university, in order to apply to the city you want to go to for your Erasmus, you must write an essay about why it is you want to go to that city. I wrote my essay all about the Feria de Sevilla and about how it has always been on my bucket list to take part in it. So as soon as I found out I was chosen to go to Seville for my Erasmus, all I could think about was how excited I was to see the Feria!

There is actually very little or useful information about the Feria online. The extent of my research lead me to believe that it was simply at the end of April that women dress up in flamenco dresses and men dress up in traditional suits and they just walk around the streets of the city centre. This to me, already sounded amazing and was enough to get me obsessed with coming to visit this, but it is safe to say that there is so much more to the Feria than is explained online.

This is why I was so amazed in the run up to the weeks before Feria, when Spanish friends were telling me all about casetas, rebujito and el pescaito, as I learned about none of these things during my online research. This instantly made me so excited to go as I realised there was going to be a lot more to the week than I thought.

 

However, in the run up to Feria, I did have some nervousness about the casetas. I was told there were mainly private casetas and that you had to be invited by someone’s family in order to be allowed in. This caused some apprehensiveness as, although I did have some Spanish friends, none had private casetas. I was told that the alternative would be going to public casetas but that there are only very few and that the queues were very long, so they were nearly impossible to get use out of.

This made me quite nervous for the week as I was worried it was going to be too much of an exclusive event and that a foreigner like me, was only going to be able to watch from the outside. At the time I thought this was quite a shame because I really do enjoy Spanish culture. I have made a big effort to understand it and learn from my Spanish friends. I got tips about how to dance Sevillanas ahead of time so I knew how to dance properly and I did lots of research about exactly what to wear and what not to wear, for example the difference between attire for the pescaito and for the other days. This is why I was so worried, because all I wanted was an authentic Feria experience, so I was worried I would just be watching everything from the outside.

What actually happened was quite the opposite! I went to 4 days of Feria and I was in fact invited by a friend to a private caseta! The private caseta was such an amazing experience. I was so welcomed by the friends of my friend who had invited me. They each took turns teaching me sevillanas and we had so much fun dancing together. They all chatted to me during the evening and were really excited to teach me fun things about Feria. It just shows how passionate the people here are about Feria that they were so welcoming to a stranger like me and instantly made me feel so included in all the festivities!

And then I also found that getting into the public casetas was very easy! There were no long queues, there were many of them around to choose from, even once inside there was plenty of room to sit. I was under the impression that public casetas would not be an authentic experience and that it would only be tourists attending. The reality was quite the contrary!! It was full of Spanish people dancing beautiful sevillanas and there was plenty of room at the bar to order food and drinks. So given there were a lot of Spanish people there makes me believe that they were indeed authentic and personally, I enjoyed the public casetas just as much as the private ones.

 

 

 

 

 

All in all, I feel very lucky to have been able to experience this amazing week of traditions. So many tourists every year spend so much money on a trip to Seville just to see the Feria, I was just a short walk away from it and go down whenever I felt like it. I also am very appreciative of how much I felt welcomed into the culture of traditions of the week. Everyone was so enthusiastic to teach me things and therefore make me feel really included. The whole week was so much fun so now I want to come back every year! What they say is true; the people of Seville really know how to have a good time!!

 

 

 

 

 

Todas las imagenes son fotos que yo mismo he sacado.