Festival de la Primavera

Once a year, the city of Trujillo hosts its Festival de la Primavera (Spring Festival) bringing out thousands of people to enjoy dance shows, entertainment, a beauty pageant and a giant parade. The festival is hosted by the Lions Club and since our town has a local Lions Club chapter we were invited to march in the parade. The mayor of our town is also the president of our Lions Club chapter and he invited Milene and I to participate with the town in the parade. Tens of thousands of people showed up to watch the parade and Milene and I marched for about three hours throughout all of Trujillo, smiling and waving the whole way. I think we were probably the only gringos in the entire parade, but we were happy to represent our town. A few weeks later, Milene was in Trujillo again for a visit and she stopped by a small street store to buy some water. The lady at the counter looked at her inquisitively and then burst into an “aha! I got it” expression. She said, “Hey, you’re the gringa from Cajamarca who was in the Spring Festival aren’t you?!” Mind you, this is a city of several hundred thousand people so we were both pretty impressed by the face recognition. We haven’t gotten a fan response since then, but we still like to think of ourselves as a local celebrity in Trujillo… ;)

Below are some pictures of the parade and also a short video of a horse show we saw there. The horses are trained to do all kinds of trotting and even dance to the Marinara (unfortunately I couldn’t get the horses dancing the Marinara on camera…).