00:00Three in the morning, a pair of hands pinning one flower into cork.
00:05They'll do that 180,000 times before Friday afternoon.
00:11This is a fishing town on the Cantabrian coast, about 11,000 people.
00:17Every year they grow their own flowers, build monumental sculptures, and cover them by hand in a single night.
00:24By Saturday, all of it is brown, and then it's gone.
00:30Ten months of work, and nothing survives the weekend.
00:33They knew that before they started.
00:36By the end of this, you'll understand exactly why they choose it that way.
00:40Every year, on the last Wednesday of August, one Spanish town spends an hour destroying its own food, on purpose.
00:5020,000 people, well over 100 tons of overripe tomatoes.
00:55You know this one, most of the world does.
01:00Two days later, the last Friday of the same month, a town on the northern coast does the exact opposite.
01:07And hardly anyone outside Spain has heard of it.
01:11A dozen monumental floats, covered across every centimeter in fresh flowers, pinned on one at a time, by hand.
01:19The town has about 11,000 residents.
01:23Across the festival week, something like a quarter of a million people come.
01:2820 visitors for every person who lives there, on a coast most foreign visitors to Spain never see.
01:35Which raises a question the flowers don't answer.
01:40Where did this come from?
01:43It didn't begin as a celebration.
01:45It began as a complaint.
01:48Summer, 1908.
01:51Representatives of three fishing guilds on the same bay go to see the king.
01:56Their problem isn't sentimental.
01:59Large trawlers are wiping out the small boats.
02:02And as part of it, the guild dresses its rowing boats.
02:0725 of them.
02:08Flowers, garlands, streamers.
02:11A gondola called La Argentina takes the prize.
02:14Because the king is watching, half the coast turns out to watch with him.
02:21That's the accident.
02:23The protest gets absorbed, and the spectacle outlives it.
02:27Then it changes hands.
02:30The summer families are arriving on this coast, and the earliest floats are dressed with flowers cut from their own
02:36gardens.
02:37They commission the work.
02:39Their children ride on top of it.
02:41It stops once, for the civil war.
02:44When it returns, the competition rules and the look of the floats have both been reset.
02:51And then it changes hands one final time.
02:54The wealthy families stop riding.
02:57The designing passes to local craftsmen, the carochistas.
03:01And it never leaves them again.
03:04So you know who owns it now.
03:07But that still doesn't explain the strangest decision in the whole thing.
03:12Why build any of it out of something that dies?
03:17Start with the part that makes sense.
03:19The work takes ten months.
03:22A crew designs a theme, builds an iron and timber frame, sculpts the figures on top of it.
03:31The sculpting material changed everything.
03:35It used to be wood and plaster, heavy, limited.
03:38Then, in the 70s, synthetic cork.
03:41Light enough to build big.
03:43That is why these floats became monumental.
03:46Not ambition.
03:48Material.
03:50Second piece.
03:51They don't buy the flowers.
03:53They grow them.
03:54The fields around the town are sown with dahlias and clavellones in chosen color varieties,
04:00picked for what they'll look like pinned next to each other.
04:02So the palette isn't decided in a workshop.
04:06It's decided a season earlier, in soil.
04:09Here's where it gets interesting.
04:11Ten months of framework.
04:13A whole growing season of color.
04:15Every part of this is slow.
04:18And then the third piece contradicts both of them.
04:22The flower has to be cut in the three days before the parade.
04:26Any earlier, and the color is gone before it reaches the circuit.
04:30So the freshness is guaranteed by the deadline.
04:33And the deadline is not negotiable.
04:36Which means the slowest craft in Spain ends in a sprint.
04:41Ten months of building.
04:43Seventy-two hours of flowering.
04:45Everything you will actually see happens last.
04:49So now you have all three pieces.
04:52Ten months of structure.
04:53A season of color.
04:55And three days to put them together.
04:58Which is why the night before looks like this.
05:02A single float can carry between 150 and 180,000 flowers.
05:08Every one pinned on by hand in the hours before it rolls.
05:12Not machine-placed.
05:14Not pre-assembled.
05:16Pinned.
05:18And the whole town is doing it at once.
05:20Because the whole town is working to the same deadline.
05:23And the deadline came from the flower.
05:27Crates of cut dahlias.
05:29Adhesive.
05:30Salt air off the bay.
05:32A brass band three streets away.
05:35Three generations of the same family on one float.
05:40Now, here is the part that should not work.
05:44The doors are open.
05:46From eight in the evening, the workshops let anyone walk in and watch.
05:50No ticket.
05:52No barrier.
05:53No backstage.
05:55A town of 11,000 people opens its workrooms in the middle of the night and lets strangers watch it
06:02finish.
06:03And every person in those rooms knows exactly how long this is going to last.
06:09They cut it three days ago.
06:12For that reason.
06:13And here's where the three pieces clicked together.
06:18Finally.
06:19Into one answer.
06:22Something that dies in two days cannot be manufactured in advance.
06:27It cannot be subcontracted to a company somewhere else.
06:31It cannot be stockpiled, sold on, or put in a museum.
06:36It can only be made here.
06:38By the people who are here.
06:40In the last 72 hours.
06:45That is why the designing could pass to the carosistas and stay with them.
06:49The material made the work impossible to take anywhere else.
06:53The flower isn't the decoration on this festival.
06:56The flower is the reason the town still owns it.
07:00By Saturday, it's gone.
07:03Brown at the edges, then finished.
07:05Nothing is kept.
07:07And that was always the point.
07:10So, the next time someone tells you a festival is just a party, ask what it's made of, and how
07:17long it lasts.
07:19If you want the other half of that week in Spain, the tomato fight, and why a town of 10
07:25,000 agreed to be buried in fruit once a year, that explainer is next.
07:31Nothing here was built to survive.
07:34That is why it's still here.
07:40For more stories like this, like, follow, and subscribe to Daily Hunt.
07:50Subscribe to OneIndia and never miss an update.
07:55Download the OneIndia app now.
