PhD Program in Historical studies
The Holy Week of Seville
Holy Week in Seville is one of the most important religious ceremonies in the world. Each year, the Andalusian city is overrun by hundreds of thousands of faithful and tourists. The Sevillian processions have a long history behind them, which has its roots in the fourteenth century. The moment of greatest splendour of the Holy Week in Seville coincided with the Baroque era, an era in which Seville, thanks to the monopoly of trade with the New World, had become the most populous of Spain and one of the most important economic and financial capitals of the Old Continent.
Throughout the Holy Week in Seville a myriad of statuesque representations of the Passion are staged, involving more than sixty confraternities. The sacred processions are focused on a repetitive and exhausting confrontation between Christ and the Virgin, between the image of martyrdom and that of pain. A unique experience in the the European festive landscape, in recent decades it has definitively established itself as a must for the faithful and lovers of Baroque religious rites to the point that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Holy Week in Seville has experienced and is still experiencing its second golden age.