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Pedro clapped his strong hands round my shoulders and shook me vigorously. Behind his handsome, square face, the sky was turning blue, creating a halo of dim light round his black hair. Sunday morning was now only minutes away and I had not slept a wink for the third night running. Our foreheads touched like drunks enjoying their terminal breath and his steely eyes stared into mine.

“I think you are enjoying the festival?” he said.

“Yes, but you Spaniards have hard heads and strong stomachs,” I replied.

“Stomachs”, he roared, “yes, yes, we must have bull’s tail and kidneys for breakfast.”

At their best, Spanish festivals are visceral experiences - stomach churning turns from the bullfight to the bar to the dance floor. They are a whirl of gaiety and indulgence painted lightly over rituals that are the triumph of tradition. As Alfonso marched me through the debris of the fairground at dawn, I reflected that to enjoy them, you have to have, like the Spaniards, an extraordinary capacity to experience with your senses.

Jerez’s ‘Feria del Caballo’, or Horse Fair, is one of Andalucia’s best festivals. Alfonso X, or Alfonso the Wise as his subjects sycophantically knew him, had the wit to instigate the affair in the 13th century. However, what began as an honest livestock sale has mutated, over the centuries, into something far grander and more entertaining. Today, it is a two week celebration of all the things that Jerez is famous for, and which Andalucians love - sherry, flamenco, bullfighting and horses.

Horses are intrinsic to the culture of Jerez and the town is considered to be the birthplace of the Spanish thoroughbred. Carthusian monks reared the noble beast in the 15th century and today it is central to the work of Jerez’s three renowned studs and the Royal Andalucian School of Equestrian Art. During the Feria there are equestrian competitions in everything from bull training skills to gymnastics on horseback. However, it is at the fairground itself where the Andalucian passion for the horse is so apparent.

Parc Gonzalez Hontoria teems with aristocratic looking horsemen in broad-brimmed hats, tight black trousers and short jackets, astride their manicured mounts. The ladies, splendid in long, frilly flamenco dresses, sit side-saddle behind them. In this decorous fashion, the riders walk their horses slowly round the park, stopping periodically for a ‘catavino’ of sherry.

The riders don’t really go anywhere, nor do anything. They are simply to be admired in this, their supreme moment of ostentatious display. The atmosphere of studied theatrical piety is, it may seem to the outsider, quite out of keeping with the revelry which is going on around them, but they are an intrinsic part of the festival - they are the ceremony, the pride and the tradition that the Spanish love.

There is tradition in abundance at the nightly bullfight or ‘Fabulosa Corrida de Toros’ as it is billed. Walking from the fairground to the bullring for the Saturday evening fight, a suave, elderly man smoking a cigar told me that the bullfight is the only public function in Spain to begin on time. Certainly, the languid torpor, which infects the hot afternoons at the fairground, dissolves as the ‘afficionados’ dash the short distance along streets lined with flowering jacaranda trees, to get seats in the ‘sombra’ or shade at the bullring.

In the big Spanish cities, bullrings rise in the suburbs like great red gasworks but in Jerez, which has a population of 180,000, the ‘corrida’ is as intimate as the Feria itself. Men in linen suits and ties escort their women, dressed delicately in their ‘bata de cola’ (spotted flamenco dresses) and shawls with ‘mantillas’ (ornate combs) suspended in their hair.

The bullfight is essentially a passion of the Andalucians. The short gasps of the crowd as the matador displays his array of skilful manoeuvres, testing the ‘toro bravo’ (fighting bull) and the experience of the spectators, are wonderful to listen to. I sat with the Rebuelta family as ‘El Juli’, the teenage upstart matador and recent national sensation, flirted with 300 kg of bull and the hearts of hundreds of women. When he thrust his short sword into the beast’s neck for a clean kill, blood spread like thick paint down its shoulders. ‘El Juli’ was carried out of the bullring and we went off for dinner.

Though there is a steady intake of food and wine all day at the Feria, the real feasting begins after the bullfight. With ‘El Juli’s’ success fuelling our fever, we descended on a huge table at the restaurant ‘Tendido 6’ and set about dinner with gusto. Spanish food may not guarantee clean arteries and longevity, but it is great to eat. You need a strong stomach for some Andalucian tapas specialities - pork loin stuffed in sausage skin, brains, tripe and good old ‘criadillas’ or bull’s testicles - but around Jerez, the seafood is also spectacular. Crab, huge clams, prawns and langoustine all come fresh from the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.

All of this is washed down with the one thing that you simply cannot avoid at the ‘Feria del Caballo’, sherry. Jerez is the home of sherry and the main reason for the town’s prosperity. The fortified wine, made from the ‘palomino’ grape which grows in the chalky soil of the Guadalquivir valley, is produced in the ‘bodegas’ or wineries which the British were largely responsible for developing in the mid-19th century. If you don’t know your ‘finos’ from your ‘olorosos’ and ‘amontillados’, Jerez is the place to taste and learn.

Back at the Parc Gonzalez Hontoria, Saturday night at the Feria was swinging and the 200 ‘cassetas’ (permanent tents) were pulsing with music. In the tents sponsored by the affluent families and the ‘bodegas’, Andalucia’s finest flamenco singers were belting out their muscular songs of sorrow and stamping their feet. Flamenco originated among the gypsy communities of Andalucia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and Jerez remains a hotbed of the music today. The ‘buleria’, the most festive of all the flamenco dances, originated here.

In the public tents, the jeunesse d’ore from Seville and Cadiz were swilling beer and kicking up the dust to less traditional flamenco rock while at the funfair, young teenagers were exploring the boundaries of conventional courtship.

I had another fill of sherry and provided some amateurish percussion with my hands to accompany a flamenco guitarist, but by midnight my senses were sated, and while the party raged around me, I could feel the lure of my bed. I walked through the farrago of the final night of the Feria, passed the mime artists and the apple-sellers, the bulging cassetas and the parading youth. But I had not accounted for the sensational capacity of my Spanish hosts. Just as the gate of the park came into sight, I felt those firm hands clap round my shoulders. It was Pedro:

“Ah, my friend. I was looking for you. Are you ready for the party?”

Festivals
Andalucians indulge their love of colour, dressing up, flirting, pageantry and partying at numerous fiestas all year round. Most small villages have at least one festival. Many are religion-based, but that does not mean they are short on fun. Most places hold their annual ‘Feria’ in the summer. The following is a list of the main festivals during the summer. It is by no means exhaustive and there is always a festival going on somewhere in Andalucia. For more information, contact the Spanish Tourist Office.

1. Semana Santa (Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday) - Parades of holy images, lines of penitents and big crowds in almost every city, town and village. Seville has the most famous celebrations.

2. Feria de Abril (late April) - Coloured tents, festive lights and non-stop merrymaking are the hallmarks of Seville’s massive annual party. Flamenco and bullfights daily.

3. Festival de Jerez (late April) - Not to be confused with the Feria, this two week festival is devoted to music and dance, especially flamenco.

4. Feria del Caballo (early May) - The Horse Fair.

5. Romeria del Rocio (Pentecost weekend) - Festival pilgrimage of up to one million people, many in traditional Andalucian dress, to the village of El Rocio in Huelva Province. Spain’s most famous pilgrimage.

6. Corpus Christi (June) - Processions in Seville, Jaen and a general fiesta in Granada.

7. Potaje Gitano (Gypsy stew) - flamenco festival in Utrera in June. One of three big annual one night events for ‘aficionados’, all in Seville province. (The others are La Caracola and Gazpacho.)

8. Dia de la Virgen del Carmen (on the feast day, 16th July, of the patron saint of fisherfolk, in many coastal towns) - images of the saint are carried into the sea amid a flotilla of small boats.

9. Feria del Malaga (from about 15th August for nine days) - One of the most animated summer ferias.

Bullfighting
Andalucia’s bullfighting year begins in April with the Feria de Abril in Seville. Jerez is the next major festival. There are good fights at all the major festivals through until the ‘corrida’ on the Dia de la Hispanidad in mid-October.

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