The mystery of Semana Santa

Although I haven't yet lived full-time in Spain, I reckon I understand the country, language and culture reasonably well, for a guiri. But I don't get the Andalusian Semana Santa tradition of processions by cofradías of penitientes. Each Andalusian city has dozens of cofradías - brotherhoods or societies - each with its home church. During Holy Week they bring out a sculpture of Jesus or some such and process it around a set route. The sculpture and the supporting platform is incredibly heavy, and big, tough guys hide inside sweating and suffering, and anonymous hooded figures looking like the Ku Klux Klan accompany it. It's the same every year.

So far, so Catholic and odd. But the really strange part is the coverage. Acres of newsprint and hours of TV are devoted to in-depth analysis of every last detail. Pundits debate the relative merits of different cofradías and compare the current season's performance with previous years - and they go back decades. The weather, the turn-out, the intricate time-tabling of many different processions in the same streets are debated endlessly. Ideal, the Granada newspaper, today has an ecstatic report of the Holy Thursday processions reaching a "zenith...an apotheosis". But there's never much in the way of overtly religious matter in the coverage - it's all about spectacle, precision, skill and endurance. And being atheist and passionately anti-clerical - which is true of a surprisingly high proportion of post-Franco Spaniards - is no bar to taking Semana Santa processions very, very seriously indeed.

To me it combines aspects of sport, art, ritual and tradition in a way that's a little like bullfighting. Then it adds in the extreme parochial competition of, say, Sienna's Palio horse races, or English village cricket matches. There are echoes of the Inquisition's oppression; taking part was once a way of showing you weren't a muslim or a Jew, while the headgear meant that nobody would know if you kind of looked a bit Jewish or Arab. There's a strong element of Catholic (and maybe Fascist or Nationalist, I don't pretend to understand) triumphalism which has survived the evolution of Spanish society into one of the most secular and enlightened in Europe. And the gypsies get their very own cofradía. Baffling.