Spain 3: Christmas season

Supposedly Spain’s economy is a poor shape, but you couldn’t really tell from the Spanish Christmas season. We arrived about a week before Christmas, and the whole week, if it wasn’t raining, people were shopping. One night out in Madrid we were caught in an absolute crush around 10 at night, it was a great festive crowd of holiday hats and blinking lights all around.

One of the favourite things for which people were shopping were the massively elaborate nativity scenes. You can see a selection of the baby Jesuses from one of the stalls below. There where whole markets of this sort of thing, including little animated statues so you could build a full and lively Bethlehem.

And at just about every turn, someone had made a little nativity scene. Every now and again, they’d made a very large one. The picture below is one of the main squares in Ubeda, which had been transformed into a giant nativity scene, with a petting zoo, mannequin Mary and Joseph, and people cooking over an open fire. Certainly the largest nativity scene I have ever seen.