The entire city of Oaxaca is one big festival during the Christmas season with hundreds of food stands, carnival rides, craft markets and parades or posadas every night. Legend has it that 350 years ago two Dominican monks came up with a marketing idea to help indigenous farmers sell their produce. They encouraged the farmers to carve their beets, carrots and radishes into fantastic shapes and thus were born the “Night of the Radishes”. The radishes are specially grown for the occasion and have been heavily fortified to grow to their sometimes-enormous size of 40 inches – needless to say they are not consumable. Since 1897 the management of this special festival was taken over by the municipal government and promoted as a tourist event. Each year on December 23 dozens of displays are set up for the three-hour evening event and thousands upon thousands of people converge on the zocolo to witness these very original folk artworks. Here is but a small sample of the sculptures – my favorite: farm life with tractor.
3 comments:
Love your site. Hubby and I are leaving the 16th, from PA, heading for Baja for the first camping in MX. I don't hear any problems you had, just interesting site and places. Just what I suspected. Hope we have just as much fun. Thanks for the interesting pics and writeups.
Hi Uncle Jeff and Aunt Deb: I love the raddish pictures. They are soooooo cool. ( I wonder how they make them) could the raddish carvers make carvings out of every food.Hows Corkie and Isabella tell them I say HI!
Bye , Love michaela
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