The Exploding Hammer Festival: Guanajuato’s wildest Carnival tradition

All implicit the world, radical observe peculiar occasions with festivals. While astir of them person a unsocial constituent of attraction, there’s 1 festival successful the Bajío of cardinal Mexico that whitethorn beryllium the astir bonzer of all: the Exploding Hammer Festival.

Called the Festival del Martillo Explosivo successful Spanish, this festivity stands retired for the signifier of hitting the crushed with 30-kilogram hammers to detonate an explosive device. It has been taking spot for centuries successful the tiny assemblage of San Juan de la Vega, adjacent Celaya, Guanajuato.

This is precisely arsenic unsafe arsenic it looks. (Gigazine)

The commencement of the Exploding Hammer Festival

Despite being centuries old, the festival is hardly known extracurricular of Celaya, arsenic authorities person tried to forbid it owed to its risky nature. Last year, determination paper El Sol Del Bajío reported 43 people, including 4 children, severely injured by the explosions.

This somewhat convulsive festival honors the community’s patron, Juan Aquino de la Vega, fondly called San Juanito. It re-enacts a 17th-century skirmish betwixt Aquino de la Vega, a affluent miner, and immoderate bandits who stole his gold. Another mentation of the communicative says that de la Vega was himself a bandit and benignant of section Robin Hood who stole from affluent miners, redistributing their golden among the poor.

As a faithful devotee of Saint John the Baptist, the fable goes, de la Vega promised to signifier a festival each twelvemonth successful his grant for the occurrence of recovering his gold.  Although de la Vega is simply a people saint and not recognized by the Catholic Church, he’s considered the town’s patron and highest deity.

The convulsive re-enactment of a battle

The Exploding Hammer Festival takes spot connected Shrove Tuesday, the past time of the Carnival play successful the Christian liturgical calendar. It sees antheral participants divided into 2 sides: the ladrones, oregon bandits, and the arrieros, the muleteers warring for Aquino. Each broadside takes turns blowing up the hammers astatine the section shot field.

The hammers are fitted with homemade explosives made of potassium chlorate and sulfur, which are deed against stones oregon robust plates, causing a deafening detonation that’s the item of the event. 

“The portion of the ‘thunderbolt’ is visually impressive,” Mexican movie manager Santiago Maza Stern told paper Sin Embargo regarding his 2019 documentary “Los Truenos de San Juan.”

“The odor of gunpowder, the dependable of each explosion, the columns of fume that emergence from each thunder are precise striking,” helium said. 

The festival, which continues for 5 days with different activities, besides involves theatrical productions astatine dawn re-enacting episodes from the town’s history, similar robberies and arrests. 

“For me, the carnival is afloat of magical moments,” Maza told Sin Embargo. 

Banned by authorities

Despite the magic the festival evokes successful many, authorities effort to halt the signifier each twelvemonth arsenic it has been amerciable since 2000. But they’ve been unsuccessful each time. 

As shown successful the documentary, participants smuggle gunpowder into the municipality and secretly hole tiny packets with the explosive substance earlier attaching them to the heads of the hammers. 

“We’ve ever done this, and we volition proceed to bash it,” a subordinate says successful the film. “Fingers alert off, chunks of soma alert off, we get burns. Still, we person to blast.”

With reports from Sin Embargo