The reception was to be held in a car park beside the main road, extensively beautified with bamboo fencing, palm fronds and swathes of flowers. We arrived shortly before the appointed time but, as is habitual with the famous, she was a little late in arriving. The sun had already given up and was sinking behind the hills, turning the sky into a glorious son et lumière show. The soundtrack for the show came from a group of folk singers, strumming guitars and singing appropriately demure traditional songs.
Passing by the front-row seats we greeted our many neighbours who had probably been waiting there patiently for an hour or more - Gomerans are good at waiting patiently - and found a spot to lean against a wall.
Crowds had gathered not just from our village but from other villages around, and even from the town. This was an Event! A large police presence - well, two of them, Felipe and Fernando, but notably animated - attempted to keep the wandering villagers away from the main road, without much success.
The problem was that the car park itself was now fully occupied by a small stage garlanded with flowers, rows of seats for the elderly, the strumming folk group and a bar counter with beer fountain, leaving little room for the stream of cars still arriving, which therefore had to park along both sides of the main road.
Finally the two harrassed policemen introduced an impromptu one-way flow system which they controlled at each end with arm gestures and whistles. No-one in the meandering crowds got killed and although the line of vehicles queuing to get by on the main road grew steadily longer, many of them tooted their horns in cheerful support when they eventually passed through. Nobody would complain about a visit by La Morenita.
A sudden surge in mobile phone activity signalled that at last her cavalcade was approaching. She drew up in a kind of self-assembly Popemobile, a huge glass cabinet carried on the platform of a sparklingly clean pickup truck. Designated assistants from the village helped to extract La Morenita, perched on a golden plinth draped with red velvet and fresh flowers. They carried her with exquisite care to her place on the stage, where she was formally greeted with speeches from the attendant priest and a representative of the organising committee. A guitar duet played a classical piece for her, and some of the local children sang a song of praise, a verse each. They’ll remember this day, with pleasure I hope.La Morenita, ‘the little dark one’, is an affectionate family name for the Virgen de Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the island’s patron saint. She normally resides safely at home in a little chapel by the sea, but today she is nearing the end of a journey that began nearly two months ago, when she was taken from her chapel, placed in a fishing boat and carried around the coast amid a large flotilla to land on the beach in San Sebastián. It happens only once every five years, the years of Las Lustrales, which is a fancy way of saying five years.
La Morenita is the guardian and protector of every town and every village on the island. She is hugely popular and revered. Hand-painted signs around our car park and on the main road shouted Gracias, Madre! Thank you, Mother! in huge letters.
Watching all this adoration, it was clear that there was something more than mere religion involved here. The Catholic religion is no longer the powerful force that it used to be in Spain, when attendance at Mass and events such as this was obligatory.
No, La Morenita represents something more. She represents the island, the people, the way of life. She is a rock-solid core to the island’s culture and a social glue that binds everyone together. I’m a little bit envious. Try as we might, we can never experience the sense of belonging that La Morenita provides to those who were born here.
Ah, well… We can still join in with the celebrations and enjoy the free paella and wine. After an excitement like this visit you need to calm down again slowly over some celebratory refreshments. Gomerans are good at celebratory refreshments.
Notes for the serious student
I touched on the subject of this five-year celebration in a previous story (A moment of madness, 18 April 2018) but left open the question of who exactly she is, this Virgen de Guadalupe.
Physically La Morenita is a very small statue. Really remarkably small, about the height of a wine bottle, but given stature by a tall crown and a splendidly elaborate plinth to stand on. Her holiness is emphasised by an aureole, a large gold circle like a ring of light behind her.
The Virgen de Guadalupe is venerated in many Catholic communities worldwide including Mexico, where she is also the patron saint. Her dark skin is undoubtedly due to her South American origins.
She seems to have arrived in La Gomera fairly early in the Spanish occupation, the imagen or statue having been carved in wood by an unknown sculptor sometime in the 16th century. She was awarded her own chapel on the coast in Puntallana, where it remains today, but she became the island’s patron only in the early nineteenth century when she took over from the Virgen del Buen Paso.
But then, does any of this really matter? In La Gomera, La Morenita is who she is, she’s always there, and once every five years we celebrate such certainty in a world of constant change.
