Puerto de Sagunto funfair expands into Alucine cinema car park
The patron saint festival of the Virgin of Begoña in Puerto de Sagunto (coastal district) runs until 15 August, with the funfair now extended into the car park of the Alucine cinema, plus concerts and children's activities.
The funfair for Puerto de Sagunto's patron saint festival, held in honour of the Virgin of Begoña, has grown this year to include the car park of the Alucine cinema alongside its usual fairground site. The expansion reflects the larger number of stalls and rides added by the festival committee for this edition, which runs from 1 to 15 August.
The celebrations kicked off on Friday 31 July, when the local fiesta association El Bocata (a "peña", a neighbourhood social club) officially opened the fairground at 20:00, ahead of the traditional "xopà" communal dinner and the opening speech that launched almost two weeks of events. Since then, the fairground has come alive each night with performances by seven bands — Invictus, Wanda, Valparaíso, Evasión, Atlántida, La Flama and Mónaco Party — whose concerts are organised partly by Sagunto City Council together with the neighbourhood's fiesta associations.
Besides music and rides, the programme includes bullfighting-related events and activities for children, keeping with the family character these festivities have traditionally had. The council has published the full schedule on its website, where residents can check times and locations for each activity day by day.
The festival's name traces back to a little-known chapter of the neighbourhood's history: devotion to the Virgin of Begoña, patron saint of Puerto de Sagunto, arrived with workers from the Basque Country who settled in the area during the boom of the 20th-century steel industry, and the neighbourhood's own parish church was modelled on the Begoña basilica in Bilbao. That link to the industrial past has its own monument too: the boat that for decades served as a support vessel for the port during the era of the Alto Horno (blast furnace) was donated in 2008 to the Fundación Patrimonio Industrial (Industrial Heritage Foundation) and today, named precisely Virgen de Begoña, stands on a roundabout in Puerto de Sagunto in memory of that economic period.
The patron saint festival is one of the most anticipated dates of the summer in Puerto de Sagunto, mobilising dozens of neighbourhood associations every year, who prepare activities for months in advance. The funfair, with its expanded grounds, will stay open every night until the festivities close on 15 August. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional background from Wikipedia and Sagunto City Council on the origin and symbolism of the festival.