The Butelo de A Fonsagrada Fair, the Fiesta del Caldo Gallego de Mourente (Pontevedra) and the Semana Santa de Santiago de Compostela (Holy Week in Santiago de Compostela) achieve this title due to their cultural value, roots and singularity.

The Consello da Xunta approved the declaration of three new festivals of tourist interest in Galicia that accredited their cultural value, roots and uniqueness. They are the Butelo de A Fonsagrada Fair in Lugo; the Galician Broth of Mourente Festival in Pontevedra; and the Holy Week in Santiago de Compostela. With its recognition, Galicia already has 141 festivals of tourist interest. Of them, 120 are festivals of tourist interest in Galicia, 12 of national tourist interest and 9 more are of international tourist interest. The declaration is made after the favourable assessment of the applications submitted by the town councils of A Fonsagrada, Santiago de Compostela and the residents’ association El Castro de Santa María de Mourente de Pontevedra by the Galician Tourism Council.

The Holy Week of Santiago de Compostela, with its origin in the 16th century, takes place in a setting recognised by UNESCO as a world heritage site and the destination of one of the most important religious pilgrimages and cultural movements: the Pilgrim’s Way to Santiago de Compostela. The celebration has 17 processions, 13 brotherhoods and more than 5,000 implied brotherhoods. On the other hand, both the Butelo de A Fonsagrada Fair and the Galician Broth Festival in Mourente have a gastronomic component, the second reason why tourists choose to visit Galicia. In both events, the protagonists are typical products and traditional production and preservation processes transmitted orally from generation to generation. In this sense, they contribute to the dissemination of this heritage and the enhancement of the value of the Community’s agri-food products.

This declaration is a reinforcement in the promotion that the autonomous government carries out in its various actions in different countries and in the 40 fairs of the tourism sector in which it participates every year, many of them at international level. The three festivals recognised today take place between the winter and the first weeks of spring, which contributes to the deseasonalisation of demand, one of the objectives set out in the aforementioned Tourism Strategy of Galicia 2020. Precisely in the first quarter of this year, during these three holidays, the number of tourists in the Community rose by 7% to over 636,000 and their nights grew by 10% to around 1.2 million.

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