dirty devils in Los Santos village

There are fairs and festivals around Panama all the time.  Looking in the newspaper, this week sees the Festival of the Mango in Rio Hato, the Flower Fair in Limon, the Fair of the Dairy Cattle in Monagrillo and the VI San Francisco of the Mountain Festival in Veraguas.  Whilst these are much more representative of the 'real Panama' than the shopping and fast food culture of the capital, I'm not really that tempted to spend hours on a bus to see a mango festival.

However there is a period of two weeks when the village of Los Santos holds various parades and dances involving quite impressive costumes, and I decided it might be worth travelling to check it out.  Mostly the parades start in the late afternoon, coinciding with the departure of the last bus back to Panama City, but on the Thursday of Corpus Christi they are around the middle of the day, following the Corpus Christi mass in the village church.  Well, the festivities actually start at 3am, with "buscando el torito".  This translates as 'looking for the little bull', which sounds for all the world to me like a game that married couples should play in the privacy of their bedroom, and with no accommodation in Los Santos in any case, I decided to give that a miss.  But I was up at 5:30 to get to the bus terminal for a bus that eventually got me to within walking distance of Los Santos by 11am.  & when I got to the village square, this is what I saw:

The streets were covered with leaves, rice husks and coloured little stones making colourful 'carpets' all around the main square.


This was where the parades were to take place, although when I arrived a set of speakers outside the church were still blasting out the service, so I had time to visit the little museum, and get myself a coffee.  There appeared to be only four other tourists in the place, but hundreds of locals, some in the red-and-black striped devil costume, holding their masks or hanging them on tree branches until the time was ready to start.

Then finally the procession came out of the church, firstly the priests and their assistants, but behind them were the devils.  The diablicos sucios (dirty devils) that the festival is known for, but also white devils, an angel, some transvestites, and various other costumes which I couldn't identify.  Although a little concerned by the number of macaw feathers in the masks, I was impressed.  Here are a few of them:

It was over pretty quickly, and by 13:15 I was queuing for a small local bus back to the long-distance bus terminal - finally getting home at 20:15.  So a very long day of travel - and no-one to explain to me what all the different costumes represented - but nevertheless a great day out.  I need to get out of the city more often!