This is one of the town’s major festivals representing the sea workers’ collectives. It has its roots in the early 19th century and brought together around this religious festival the group of sailors who used the art of the “Pincho” to catch fish. This collective “Pincheiro” became the exponent of the working class reality of Pobra and the cultural engine of the town. Religious celebrations, giants and big-heads, bands of music, lights, paper balloons… were the creations that the “pincheiros” made to commemorate their patron saint, the Virgen del Carmen, every year.
The festivities are held around the Sunday following 15 August, normally coinciding with the third Sunday in August. They conserve specific elements of the old Pincheiro collective, including the giants and big-headed figures, which are currently presided over by the giant Eliseo, who represents a real Pincheiro sailor from the 19th century. This giant was made in the Terrasa workshops by the sculptor Jordi Grau. Music bands, religious commemorations around the Virgen del Carmen, so typical along the Galician coast.
Nowadays, the festivities of the “pincheiros” give them a real recreational character and identity of a village. These are days of joy in which all the generations of the village come together: the young people through the “Sanjuerguines”, the “Olimpiada pincheira” and the “Festa da auga”, open-air dances for the not so young, typical dances, music bands, bagpipes….. A whole explosion of fervour and celebration that every year makes present an intangible heritage of Pobra that shows a part of the identity of this town: the sea and the people of the sea, representatives of the world of work, of effort, of life in the day to day.
