18.05.08 Party time!

This weekend was La Paz’s biggest street festival—the Gran Poder. 56 troupes of dancers perform, some with 200 members each. It’s a huge event and a car crash of bright colours. There was a great atmosphere in the city among the huge crowds. The route was lined with makeshift grandstand seating and the space between spectators and performers was a pedlar’s paradise of flogging food, cold soft drinks, hooters, rattles, biscuits, tissues (I’ve no idea why) and beer. There were hundreds of girls out selling beer, some of them even old enough to legally drink it. Apparently, this year the authorities tried to end the boozing, with a spectacular lack of success—they may consider taking a brewer as primary sponsor was their first mistake.

This event takes a months of planning and the outfits are truly extraordinary, devils, angels, slaves, slave masters and countless others we could not recognise, everything has a symbolic meaning, which was almost entirely lost on us. However, there were things I recognised: some costumes are heavy (80kgs) and their panting wearers are only sustained by gifts of beer; some of the prettier participants wear bright tutus, very good; they also wear boots Ginger Spice would have killed for in her 1990s heyday, very Barbarella; some of the men wear dresses, shoulder pads and hats that most resemble layered wedding cakes, I would love to know why.

It was undeniably a great spectacle and one I didn’t fully understand. On the way out we met a lady selling pork, in front of her was a tower of crackling, she loved the event and told us this was “paradiso”. Who knows, maybe she was right.