Costa Rican Guacales Are Dried-Out, Decorated Gourds.

This Saturday July 5th the inauguration of the Festival of the Dance of the Guacales, will take place in Santa Cruz, Guanacaste. The staff together with the 300 pupils of the Technical College of Santa Barara, in the canton of Santa Cruz, have been busy as bees getting this fifth Cultural Festival of the Guacales ready in which 3,000 Guacales will be on display, decorated with bright colors. These will be given as souvenirs to those who took place in various activities. Children are given extra time off from school to help prepare them.

The festival of Guacales started to be celebrated some 29 years ago, and the Guacales are of course the main interest during this activity; Guacales, which are cooking utensils that were used by the indigenous, represent the ancient cultures of Costa Rica. This festival was declared to be of cultural interest on July 18th of the year 2002. It attracts a larger crowd every year, and even foreigners now come to enjoy the festivities, those who are thirsty for a piece of our culture and who want to take some of it back home with them; they come for the music and the dancing and the overall enjoyment. Special food is prepared for the occasion, and it always includes a chicken dish as well as lots of exciting specialties of the area.

The excitement actually started on July 1st as the locals started getting everything ready for action with a traditional cultural week; local artists and musicians showed off their skills, and soon the best of typical music, folkloric dance, theater, poetry and singing could be found everywhere. In the evenings, the festivities all took place in the gymnasium until the grand opening finally explodes this Saturday.

Musical groups Pikin, la Nueva Septima, and Relampago will have the honor to inaugurate the festival at 8pm, without of course forgetting the Maribel Orquestra of Marimba, which is after all traditional, as it gives to the festival its cultural flavor. The marimba, a wooden xylophone, is a traditional Guanacaste instrument.

The cost of entry is 5,000 colones and it does not include food and refreshments. Don’t miss this typical event, it oozes of the essence and spirit of Guanacaste, for its sounds as much as for its smells and of course, for its beautifully painted Guacales, vestiges of ancient lost civilizations. The energy the festival expells is only to be found there, in Guanacaste, where a little of the old life can still be found. Indeed there is more to Costa Rica than beautiful beaches and luxurious hotels, and it would be a shame to leave the country without a glimpse of the real thing.

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Filed under: Travel on July 4th, 2008