Medellin Flower Festival

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Medellin’s annual Flower Festival is one of Colombia’s most important regional festivals. Every year the country celebrates its success and the stars of the show are always the silleteros, who have their very own parade.

The silleteros in the festival are flower vendors. They spend the rest of the year farming small plots of land on the misty mountain slopes around “The City of Eternal Spring” — Medellin in Antioquia — where they harvest their blooms and bring them to sell in nearby markets and plazas. The word silla means seat or chair in Spanish and comes from a time when local men, usually peasants, strapped wooden chairs on their backs to carry their produce, children and even local noblemen. Nowadays the word silletero is applied to anyone who carries something in a wooden frame on their back.

True to tradition, the silleteros carry their precious flowers through the streets of downtown Medellin on their backs as part of their starring role in the flower festival, which is held every August. They were at the heart of the first festival, in 1957, when 40 silleteros turned up to parade. Nowadays around 500 participate in their dedicated parade, which most spectators consider the highlight of the flower festival.

Today through heygo tours I was able to visit a local family where Nacho demonstrated the different types of flower displays that are carried, the traditional carrier weighs 30-50 kgs using only flowers from the garden, next, the exotics which can weight between 60-100kgs. The third class is a display based on a topic and the last class is the commercial class which is usually sponsored.

This week I should be in Madeira for their annual flower festival so it was a treat to be able to visit Colombia even if virtually although we only saw photos of the parade it was interesting to hear the origins of the silleteros.

http://www.heygo.com

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