Pilgrimage of Virgen de Piedraescrita

The main feast of Campanario is dressed with floats made by its inhabitants. Light and colour fulfil the party which involves the inhabitants in the designing and creation of the floats, as far as music and dance come along with pilgrims on their way where the written stone was found.

The origin of this celebration is located at 13th century, when the people of this town found an Roman funeral stone and a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary just in the same place.

The Roman stone had a carved text: To Lucio Valerio Fabio Calixto, Silvano Victello Valeriano: winners.

The statue of the Virgin Mary was so called: Virgin of Piedraescrita ('written-stone')

From that moment the pilgrimage has evolved to become into the feast celebrated nowadays .

Celebration begins Easter Monday in the city centre with the traditional float parade. People use a great amount of tissue paper, glue, and metal structures and spend about two months to build up the floats. The extraordinary results led to create a competition to choose the best one.

Once the parade is over pilgrims go to the hermitage buid to conmemorate the discovering of the stone and the statue.

There they enjoy in the countryside, and people uses to taste typical dishes such as cured meat pies called 'jornazo', a dessert decorated with hard-boiled egg, and the excellent wines of this zone.

On the way back to Campanario people make some stopovers to sing and dance, there is a compulsory stopover in Piedraescrita Cross.

Back to the town, the celebration goes on with a street party that ends up in the early morning.

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