City of Flowers, Part II

Desfile de Silleteros
Flower Parade

The evening we flew into Colombia we landed high in the hills above Medellin in an area known as Rio Negro. As we wound down the hills Angela, our human resources director, told us that we were passing through flower country. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see the colorful fields of flowers as we passed through, but the scent, even in our exhausted, overwhelmed state, was amazing. This area, including the town of Santa Elena, is where many flowers are grown and exported to the United States and Canada. The one other reason for the year round production of flowers is for the Desfile de Silleteros.

The school organized tickets in the seated area for all of the new teachers. Buses picked us up at our houses at 10:30 and we slowly snaked our way through massive amounts of traffic to the downtown area. As we filed into the stands at 12:00 for the 3:00 start to the parade we were handed t-shirts, paper fans with the local rum decals, ponchos, and yes shot glasses on lanyards for easy access and sharing in the stands. We sat down in an area with a live band directly behind us. Venders circulated offering empenadas, (stuffed pastries), agua, coca-cola, cervezas (beer), fifths of Aguardiente (the local answer to moonshine), and Ron (Rum). Let’s just say the stands were a happy place to be and by the time the Desfile de Silleterso began everyone was extremely friendly!

Silla- is the Spanish word for chair and was the common way to carry supplies or people on Silleteros’s (chair carriers) backs from town to town. For the flower festival over 400 flower growing families stay up all night before the festival and design the most amazing flower displays, to be carried on the workers backs down the mountain and for 3 hours through Medellin in the biggest festival of the year. There are several different types of displays the Silleteros carry. The traditional, our personal favorite, are large bouquets packed into the Sillas weighing up to 150 pounds. Other displays look like large disks and the flowers are fashioned into pictures and sayings, similar to the floats in the Rose Bowl Parade. These pictures ranged on themes from Paz Para Colombia (Peace for Colombia), Viva Juan Pablo Segundo (Long live Pope John Paul II), and GOOOOAL Nacionales (one of three local professional futbol teams). These displays can weigh up to 250 pounds, and remember they are carried the 16 miles down the mountain and for three hours of the parade on someone’s back! The last type of display is a commercial display, and the only ones that are allowed use dried flowers. Therefore, these are often made weeks in advance, instead of the night before, and are posted outside restaurants and other businesses before and after the parade as advertisements. We recognized our bank, Bancolombia, our grocery store, Pomona, and the universal Coca-Cola emblem.

For hour after hour exhausted silleteros of all ages intermixed with local dancers paraded in front of the grandstands where we were sitting with thousands of new found amigos colombianos. Throughout this long and energized day we discovered the true meaning of the flower festival, it is not a celebration of the local flower production and Antioquen culture, the county Medellin is in, but yet another reason to party!