The Fiestas de San Roque in Blanca (April and August)
San Roque protected Blanca from the plague in 1828
The local fiestas in honour of San Roque which are held in the town and municipality of Blanca are unusual for a variety of reasons, the main one being that they are held not only on and around the saint’s feast day on 16th August but also in the month of April. This means that local residents can enjoy two bouts of festivals in honour of the same saint each year.
The reason for the April celebrations in Blanca is that San Roque was thought to be the protector of the Ricote valley town during the outbreak of plague which affected the Kingdom of Murcia in 1828, when the Bishop and the Cathedral Chapter of Murcia took refuge here.
Legend has it that the Saint appeared to the locals in the countryside outside the town, and on the spot where he was seen a small church was built in his honour. The residents of Blanca vowed to make a pilgrimage to the church every year on the Friday following Easter and this tradition is still upheld in the Romería, during which the figure representing the Saint is carried to the “ermita” (small church) which bears the name of San Roque. After Holy Mass the image is then paraded through the streets of the town.
In August the fiestas feature a series of bull runs in the streets of Blanca, and both offer a wide range of other activities and entertainments.
The first Blanca statue of San Roque was unfortunately one of many such victims of the Civil War in Spain between 1936 and 1939, and the one currently used was created in 1941 by the sculptor Federico Coullaut-Valera Mendigutia from photographs of the original. Ever since then the fiestas have been held annually in more or less the same format as nowadays.
