Wild Late Night Fireworks in Oaxaca

On our way home from the evening out with Rocio and her family, we happened across a public celebration hosted by a church the likes of which we had never seen. So we parked nearby and went to see what was happening. Apparently, in Mexico, the churches often host public nighttime celebrations with music, dancing, and fireworks to commemorate their founding.

This particular church was just a few blocks from our hotel, in the center of Oaxaca. It started out in a charming, low-key way with some beautiful, oversized dancing twirling puppets. Things then started get a little wild with fireworks attached to smaller paper mache puppets running around the street, and climaxed with a 'castillo', a large scaffolded structure 70 feet tall, that exploded into a strange Mexican mix of illuminated christian and indigenous symbols.

First, the puppets, dancing, twirling, to live music that was being played by a band outside the church behind us.

The puppets seemed to multiply over time; at one point there were nearly a dozen.

Jeremiah got into the action and wore one of the smaller puppets and, rather out of character, danced around the street with the other puppets for a few minutes.

And Liesl did too.

Then the toro hit the scene - exploding and popping and sending sparks flying (and much of the crowd running) in all directions while the puppeteer ran around and a torero waved a flag in his direction. Suffice to say, this was not an OSHA-approved activity.

More from the one of the several exploding bulls.

Here you see the toro and the mona - the woman puppet that, like the toro, ran and danced around the street shooting fireworks in all directions. It was a riot.

Here is a shot of the castillo, probably 70 feet high, surrounded by several hundred people in the street, began to explode and spin and smoke, illuminating images of Christ, angels, and images of the pre-hispanic sun.

Here the Christ face is being replaced by the sun.

The Sun.

This is the show's climax, including large and I think uncontrolled explosions at the top of the castillo. At one point, one of the spinning angels at the very top exploded and went flying high into the air, eventually landing on a nearby roof (better than on top of the crowd!), still fully in flames. Wow!