Fiestas
Villagarcía de Arousa Water Festival
By m.p.
Aug 16, 2007 - 8:26 PM

Legend has it that the now internationally-famous Water Festival held in Villagarcía de Arousa, on the coast of Pontevedra, Galicia, first started during a blazing hot 16th August in the mid-1980s during festivities in honour of the town’s patron saint, San Roque.

The merciless sun was beating down on the crowd of faithful as they followed the saint’s image carried in procession from the parish church to the San Roque chapel. The story goes that their pleas for water were met with buckets of water thrown down from the houses above.
There is another story that it began during a year of drought when the locals’ prayers for rain were answered after they offered up some of their last water to the saint.

The soaking turned into a custom in following years, until the Town Hall decided in the early 1990s to make it an official part of the festivities.
Now recognised as National Tourism Interest, the Fiesta del Agua, or Festa de Agua in the Galician language, attracts tens of thousands to the town every year, as the crowds in the streets delight in getting thoroughly soaked.

It all starts after the midday procession when San Roque is brought out of the church for the religious procession up to the chapel, with one very important rule: that no water may be thrown until the saint is safely inside, or outside the clearly marked-out so called ‘wet zone.’
Then the shouts of ‘Water, water!’ are heard in the crowd thronging the streets, with no-one slow to respond to their demands by using every form of receptacle imaginable to contribute to the deluge.
And if anyone is hoping to escape a soaking, fire engines are also there with teams of firemen to hose down the thousands of revellers, as the water is thrown, sprayed and poured until the early afternoon.

The Festa de Agua is twinned with another water fight: the Batalla Naval in Puente de Vallecas, a district in southeast Madrid, where a ‘naval battle’ takes place every July in honour of their patron saint, the Virgen del Carmen, who is also the patron saint of the sea and the Spanish Navy.
Complete with sailors and pirates, this naval battle uses water as the weapon and takes place 300 kilometres from the nearest coast.