ABSTRACT
During my fieldwork in Bubión, an Andalusian village located in the mountains of the Alpujarra region in southern Spain, I was frequently told a story that I not only found amusing but also provoked my curiosity.1 The reason I found it amusing was partly because of the content and partly because it was always told with such delight. The reason I found it curious was that, although fictitious or even mythical in nature, it was supposed to have happened within the living memory of at least the older generations of the village inhabitants. The story is about San Sebastian, the patron saint of Bubión, and it goes something like this. During the Spanish Civil War, Bubión and the surrounding villages were under the control of the Spanish Nationalists. This meant that all icons and statues related to practices of ‘popular Catholicism’ had to be kept hidden from the authorities. Because of the panic prevailing when removing the items out of sight, the people were not able to recall where each of them was hidden after the tension of the civil war ceased. The story tells how, after the civil war, the inhabitants of the villages started recovering their icons and statues and the people from Capileira, the neighbouring village of Bubión, found the statue of San Sebastian in the basement of their church. Because several years had passed, they assumed that San Sebastian was their patron saint and took the statue on a procession through the village’s streets. But the statue felt a great deal heavier than expected, to the point that the men could barely carry it. They nevertheless carried on walking with the procession in the direction of the central square, where the road out of the village and down the mountain slope, in the direction of Bubión, commences. As the procession moved towards the square, the statue started to feel lighter and, as a result, the procession continued to walk down the road towards Bubión. The closer they moved towards Bubión the lighter San Sebastian became and when they came to the boundaries that divide the land of Capileira and Bubión, his weight felt normal. It was at this point that the inhabitants of Capileira realized that San
Sebastian really belonged to Bubión. They had only mistaken him as their patron saint because his statue had been found in the basement of their church. They handed San Sebastian over to the inhabitants of Bubión, who continued the walk with their saint through the streets of their village and to the church. San Sebastian remains the patron saint of Bubión and his day is celebrated twice a year when the people from Bubión carry his statue out of the church and form a procession through the village during the fiesta.
