The Nazareno is the most important festival of all those celebrated in Pobra do Caramiñal throughout the year. Declared a Festival of Tourist Interest in Galicia since 2000. The festival is based on life itself as the beginning and end process of every human being. Death is apparently the main element of this festival, but this primacy of death is not something gloomy but joyful as it is intended to highlight the value of life.
The highlight of the Nazarene festivities is the Procession of the Mortajas, which takes place on the morning of every third Sunday in September.
The procession of the Nazarene or of the shrouds is presided over by the image of Jesus the Nazarene and has as a distinctive element the coffins that parade in the procession carried by relatives or friends of the person offered to the Nazarene, who walks behind the coffin dressed in a purple shroud (or white in the case of young children offered) and carrying a light in their hands. These people have been on the verge of death and consider that they have come back to life thanks to the intercession of the Nazarene. That is why they go behind the coffin, not making visible the death symbolised in the coffin, but singing of the life they can continue to enjoy and which they symbolise with the light in their hands. What is most striking about this event are the thousands and thousands of people who take part in the procession, a large number dressed in the shroud and all carrying candles in their hands, accompanied by various groups of bagpipes, music, drums, etc. It is a flood of joy that can only be understood from the Galician tradition and character of whole days in winter raining to arrive in summer in an explosion of joy and human warmth.
After the procession the people go out to enjoy and dance as a way of thanking life. And as it could not be otherwise in Galicia, all families gather their members for the special family meal on the day of the Nazarene.
The origins of this tradition date back to the 15th-16th century. There is a legend that places it in the 15th century. The original substratum of the tradition is to be found in the Barbanza mountains at the foot of which Pobra lies. There, death has been considered a hymn to life since prehistoric times and is manifested in the dolmens or mámoas, true funerary monuments in stone, as well as the petroglyphs full of magic and spirituality. The Chapel of the Dawn, located in the Church of the Deán, from which the procession departs, is unique in its form as it consists of three large 15th century altarpieces in granite stone no less, and in its content it represents a mosaic of the death-life debate in the physical and spiritual throughout human existence.
We can therefore identify and catalogue this tradition with the spiritual dimension of the people of Pobra, who have always sought a meaning to the basis of life. Spirituality that has always focused on the mountain, a place of encounter with oneself, of identity and history.
Mountains and sea, pincheiros and shrouds, are the identifying elements of Pobra, and its festivities are a reminder of the intrahistory that over the centuries has shaped the way of being and acting of the village and its inhabitants.
