Battle of the Flowers

We had first heard of Barcelos from our friend David Haylor, explaining about the legend of the Barcelos cock, the origin of the Portuguese cockerel symbol.

As we moved further north, reading our guide books, Barcelos featured rather a lot.

There was the famous market we’ve already mentioned and throughout the first week in May they have a special celebration ‘Festas das Cruzes’. Guess what, we were due to be around Barcelos the first week of May.

We stayed on a site north of Porto which was just 15 kms from Barcelos.

A very helpful lady in Tourist Information pointed out three events which she recommended as her favourite and the ones which were most typical Portuguese – the Battle of the Flowers on Saturday afternoon, the firework display on the medieval bridge at midnight on the same day and the final procession on the Monday.

As advised we turned up early for the Battle of the Flowers and managed to park about 15 minutes walk away from the centre. We took our place at the side of the road in the central “Avenida de Liberdade” and waited for the action to begin, not really knowing what to expect.

We’re still not sure what the significance of the event is (all our guide books say that the Portuguese don’t need an excuse to throw a party and enjoy themselves!).We knew there would be a carnival type procession and were probably expecting just floats of flower strewn lorries. Well we were partly right! There were two processions of people, animals, vehicles and large buckets and baskets of flower petals starting from different areas of the town and meeting in the Avenida de Liberdade. One procession starts from one end of the road, the other procession from the opposite end. We were astounded by the lengths they had gone to to decorate the floats - they were truly beautiful.

As they passed each other, going in opposite directions, they hurled flower petals at each other and the crowd. The smell was exquisite and there were petals and bits of stem everywhere including all over us! There must have been at least a 4 inch thick carpet of flower petals by the time the whole thing came to an end. Everyone taking part seemed to enjoy it immensely and so did we!