#5: Barcelona, Day 2

Thursday was part of the epiphany holiday, so most places around town were closed.  We had breakfast at the hotel and then free time until 3:30.

We went to a tiny town called Cordoba de Llobregat (yo-bra-got) not far for Barcelona.  They are famous (and i use that term loosely) for their Pessebre Vivant, which is basically a Living Nativity pagaent.  Cordoba is over 1000 years old, and many of the people in the town have lived there for generations.  It's small and quaint--like the typical European towns you see in movies--so the streets are old and narrow.  So narrow, in fact, that the bus got stuck going up a hill--the driver dropped the clutch trying to back out of the tight spot, we all got off, and then watched Cordoba's only traffic jam occur from the 3 cars trying to go up the same street the bus was squeezing out of.

Josep (that's how you spell his name, apparently) showed us a famous cliff in the town.  It looked like long red fingers of rock reaching up to the sky.  The people of Cordoba lived in the cliffs in the rocks for hundreds of years, eventually carving their town out of the side of the cliff.   Their pageant had a little town built with legit houses just like the ones their ancestors lived in.  Part of the "town" was Bethlehem and part of it was Catalonia.  Pretty much every person in the town was in the Pessebre Vivant as an actor, a stagehand, or a guide.  There was someone to play the Holy Family, the archangels, the shepherds, the wise men... everyone.  What made it unique was that they also showed scenes of life in the Catalonian countryside--women weaving or cooking in the home, men herding sheep in the mountains or chopping wood for a fire--and they wove it into the nativity story.  According to the people of Cordoba, the shepherds that greeted Jesus were Catalans and they brought their sheep over to look at the new holy baby.  They even had a young lady dressed as a angel being launched off the top of the cliff--55 feet in the air!--announcing Christ's birth.  Of course I took lots of pictures.

The best part is that Josep told some of the residents that we were Americans interested in their culture.  After the Pessebre, they whisked us to a little building where we sat down and they answered all our questions.  Apparently, we were the first Americans to ever visit their town for the Nativity pageant.  Then they pulled out the Golden Book and asked us to sign it.  Basically, the town has a book that has been signed by famous celebrities, government officials, and now us--to be kept for future generations.  We signed just a few pages away from Salvador Dali!  What an honor.