A Saturday afternoon in San Telmo in December - Candombe Day....

Other than tango, for sure, Candombe touches on black history in Latin America. Still very much alive and well especially in Uruguay, once a year, Candombe groups from Argentina and Uruguay meet on the streets of San Telmo and drum and dance their way from late afternoon until late at night. The history of Candombe - Wikipedia should do it for the interested. For the uninitiated, each group represents an African Village, with dancers (vedettes), a mother figure, a wise old man, and warriors. As each group makes such a racket, the procession moves slowly, with at least 300-500 meters between each, to give spectators a chance to recover their hearing I suppose.

 

 

This gives an idea of the atmosphere....one almost feels transplanted into the deepest Africa with a little bit of Rio de Janeiro Carnival thrown in for show appeal.

 

All bands are costumed to reflect their origin and group membership. All starts out pretty 'normal' with hats and t-shirts, but when night falls, the costumes become more daring and more glittery....

Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo - a good place to watch and listen, whilst indulging in a little refreshment, which yesterday at 33+ degrees was almost a must.

All bands are preceded by flag wavers...

All colours, gender and ages participate....

A 'village mother' chatting with a female drummer.

Dressed for the heat.....

A vedette joking with an onlooker

Streets are blocked off for miles while bands slowly 'march' through taking very tiny rhythmical steps...

Face paint reflect the colours of the flag and club....

Never mind how heavily pregnant, this as yet unborn infant is being danced through the streets anyway...

The principal noise maker - drum

Participants arrive in yellow schoolbuses, which spill their load of actors and drums into a side street, where the preparations begin: costumes, face paint, leg wraps and heating of the drums...

San Telmo of course is also tango paradise, with murals and tango cafes almost at every corner

Note the leg bandages.....young drummer practising for his performance

The younger generation of vedettes

Along a side walk in San Telmo

The great undress....

Fires along the cobble stoned streets, where drummers warm up their instruments...maybe heated and expanded air inside the drums gives an additional acustic effect; I am not clear on the exact physics of this preparation

Young 'old village man' ready with his cane...

Welcome to San Telmo...

Many 'serious' vedettes weat impossibly high heels, and dance for hours on cobble stone pavements...how they avoid the cracks and holes is a mystery to me

The drummers work as hard with their fingers, as the vedettes do with their feet. FInger tips are bandaged to enable them to survive the hours of drumming to come

A line up of vedettes, ready to girate and shake to the beat of the drums.

The robe will come off soon...

to dance almost in the 'alltogether'

Calle Defensa (where the Candombe action takes place) reaches Plaza de Mayo and Avenida de Mayo, both being 'the centre' of downtown Buenos Aires. While Candombe beats around neighbouring San Telmo, the rest of the centre is cordoned off for a pre Christmas Rock Concert taking place on a huge stage in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral. I did not catch the name of the performer, but he sure drew thousands of people into the Plaza and the Avenida with his quasi religious rock songs. Make shift parillas in the form of oil drums cut in half lengthwise, took care of the hungry (no miracles of the loafs and fishes here), security staff in orange vests joined the religious fervour, police had mounted barriers as far away as a couple of blocks.

Following the songs with arms raised in prayer....

Jesus (Super Hero) loves you

A 'counter' of a parilla, where chorizos are smoking up a storm over a charcoal fire, and salsas and soft drinks are offered as a 'side'.

Canadian Health authorities would have a fit, as parillas defy any rules of hygiene, apart from smoking up all of downtown.
 

And the rest of Avenida de Mayo....closed off for the night as well, to accommodate three more giant stages for performances of the Gran Milonga Nacional, where Buenos Aires tango takes over the street. More about that later.

Well, a typical Buenos Aires Saturday afternoon - tough to be bored.