The Second Frigiliana Festival
For two years now Frigiliana has hosted a festival celebrating its heritage as the village of three cultures:
Muslim, Jewish and Christian.
The Frigiliana festival, tres culuras, lasts for four days in the final week of August and includes concerts, ethnic markets, special meals, barbecues and a celebration of
the national obsession with Tapas
The whole of Frigiliana is decorated with flags, the roads are closed to traffic and the fun begins!
Events begin with the opening of the market at about 11AM
It concludes with the latest international DJs cranking up the volume at the Frigiliana open air night club, which starts at 02AM, and finishes some hours later when the last reveller drops.
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La Ruta del Tapas
This year eleven restaurants participated in the "Frigiliana Ruta de la Tapa". Each venue offered a small Tapa and a glass of wine or beer for the bargain price of €1.
We started at La taberna de Monte Cristo, at the entrance to Frigiliana, under the balcon de Frigiliana, and slowly
drank and ate our way round the village. A thoroughly enjoyable way to pass a summer's evening.
All the dishes provided by the Frigiliana restaurants were splendid value for money but some remain memorable as particularly special. In no particular
order they were:
Taberna de Sacristan: delicately flavoured 'Albondigas' (meatballs) in a tomato and garlic sauce
Villa Frigiliana: slow cooked, tender pork fillets in a sauce made from the local wine and raisons
Monte Cristo: pork in a delicious almond sauce
Splash: a fragrant couscous dish
Santo Cristo: small salty roast potatoes in a spicy pepper sauce.
So, for eleven euros you got eleven glasses of wine and eleven small dishes. But it gets better!
At the start of the route you are given a small booklet, and at each venue you receive a stamp for each tapa.
Once you collected all eleven stamps you took the book to the tourist office and received, free of charge, a black T shirt printed with the Frigiliana festival symbol.
The concerts
 Each night featured a concert with a different theme or group.
These ranged from the unusual flamenco hip-hop band, featured in the photograph here, to Egyptian dancers.
The concerts started at about midnight (although they were scheduled to start at 11PM), and lasted 90 minutes or longer.
All of them took place in the open air Frigiliana sports arena near the tourist office, and only cost about €4 or €5
The markets
A large number of market stalls were open with a wide variety of food and goods.
Many of them had an ethnic feel, and while some of them were simply retailing mass produced products, there were quite a few genuine artisans selling home made items.
In addition to the product stalls there were many food and grocery venders. The most popular seemed to be the delicious pastry and cake marquees and the bakers.
There was also a large open air barbecue, in the centre of Frigiliana, selling a variety of sausage and meat dishes.
Throughout the evening people dressed in medieval or ethnic clothing walked by the stalls, among them jugglers, fire-eaters, dancers, sword swallowers and other entertainers.
Later in the evenings there were often firework displays, visible from most of Frigiliana. For the duration of the Frigiliana festival El Ingenio was illuminated by a giant searchlight.
The three cultures theme of the Frigiliana festival was most obvious in the old church square.
Here a large projector beamed images of a mosque and a synagogue on to the facade of the ancient church of San Antonio, itself once a mosque in Moorish times.
By the end of the four days we were left in amazement as to how such a small village could host such an impressive festival.
I have only mentioned a few of the events. There are many more and the Frigiliana festival of the three cultures should feature in every visitor's diary.
To return to an overview of the apartment click Frigiliana home page.
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