The Pirulfos of Extremadura | Today

On Carnival Sunday I was eating in Barbaño. In the living room, a large screen television is on. The restaurant was full and each group was doing their own thing: cheese, ham, prawns, meat… But, suddenly, a voice began to spread through the room: “Los Pirulfos, Los Pirulfos are coming out.” I didn’t know what Los Pirulfos was. He must have been the only ignorant one because the waiters stopped serving and the customers stopped eating. Everyone put their five senses on television, where a very large troupe appeared dressed in blue costumes and putting on a phenomenal show through the streets of Badajoz.

I timidly asked, with an extraterrestrial complex, what was it all about and they clarified that Los Pirulfos were the carnival troupe of Barbaño. A waiter explained to me that this year they aspired to everything and, indeed, the next day I found out that they had come in fourth place, a position that is quite a prize when it comes to the formidable Badajoz parade.

But the important thing was not to be first or fourth, but the pride they felt in Barbaño when checking the skill of their Pirulfos developing their choreographies, the grace of their costumes and, above all, that having Barbaño 600 inhabitants, a third of the population, around 200 neighbors, participated in the parade.

The expectation that reigned at that time in Barbaño extended to dozens of towns around Badajoz. To be exact, not only from the surrounding area, but also from places as far away from the capital as Quintana de la Serena. The Badajoz Carnival has become a phenomenon that gives character to an entire province and what excites me the most is not the choreography, costumes, chants or artifacts, but rather the organizational capacity shown by each participating group.

In the parade that we saw while we ate there was absolute synchronization. Each comparsa was the result of a work of organization, accuracy and perfection. Nothing could go wrong there and you could tell that every detail, every unforeseen event was under control. There was no room for error and if you made a mistake, the stewardship team of each comparsa was there to solve it. If perfect gears are said to be as exact as a Swiss watch or that they are the product of a strong German organization, I would add that they work with as much precision as a troupe at the Badajoz Carnival.

But let’s go back to the restaurant in Barbaño to finish the dessert, drink coffee, return to Cáceres, sit in front of the television and continue enjoying the images of the parade, admiring colors, movements and details and concluding that in Extremadura, when something excites us, we trust in us and let us be as we are, without tutelage or protectionism, we are able to function as an effective, implacable machine, without failures, organized and making the true revolution: being the best, each one in our mission.

And what I say for the Carnival also applies to Holy Week in Cáceres, when during the ten days that go from the Via Crucis to the Resurrection, 12,000 brotherhood organize dozens of processional parades in an efficient, methodical and disciplined manner in which the aesthetic and the organization are once again substantiated in a relentless exercise of coordination and accuracy in which nothing is left to chance or improvisation.

The Badajoz Carnival and the Holy Week in Cáceres are the sign that when we want, they leave us and we play it, we don’t fail.