The 3 Kings Parade in Cuenca, Spain

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The 3 Kings Parade in Cuenca, Spain, January 5th 2015

My wife & I went to Cuenca, as I’ve said in a previous blog, on January 2nd 2015, to see her family & our sons & granddaughters, one of whom was born just a couple of months earlier & who we had never met.

While we were there on January 5th there was the annual 3 Kings Parade. This parade is celebrated throughout the Spanish speaking world & has slightly different names in different countries.

The 3 Kings are what we call the “Three Wise Men” who brought gifts to Jesus in Bethlehem. We all know the Christmas carol: “We Three Kings of Orient are”.

All over Spain they celebrate the arrival of the Three Kings who, like Santa Claus or Father Christmas, bring presents to the children, only instead of it being on Christmas Eve 24th December, as we are accustomed to, the Kings bring them on the night of January 5th.

Nowadays the celebrations take the form of each king individually riding on a float with his aides throwing fistfuls of sweets to the bystanders, which the children absolutely love!

Here are some photos I took, you will have to excuse the bad quality of the photos as they were taken with my smartphone in the dark, even though I tried to position myself so that the street lights would illuminate the floats & hopefully they wouldn’t come out too dark. Some of the floats had extremely bright lighting which also spoilt many photos. At the same time they were all moving up the street towards my wife & granddaughter & me & past us.

This first float is King Caspar’s, perhaps the brightest of them all:

The 2nd float is that of Melchior’s:

The last King, Balthasar, is on the 3rd float:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Magi#Spanish_customs

That night the children receive their gifts. The following day is a Bank Holiday when a ring shaped cake, rather like an enormous flat doughnut is traditionally eaten. This generally has a small trinket & some of them are filled with cream! Most of them are bought nowadays but my wife made one here in England a couple of years ago as well!

“It is traditionally eaten on January 6, during the celebration of the Día de Reyes (literally “Kings’ Day”), which commemorates the arrival of the three Magi or Wise Men. In most of Spain, Spanish America, and sometimes, Hispanic communities in the United States, this is the day when children traditionally get presents, which are attributed to the Three Wise Men (and not Santa Claus or Father Christmas)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosca_de_reyes

Roscón de Reyes – Mallorquina" by Tamorlan – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I’ll leave you with that lovely “Roscon de Reyes”!

• 10 Feb, 2015
• 6 likes

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